IT Disasters That Can Happen on Halloween
There’s a storm coming, I can feel it in my bones…
All Hallows’ Eve is upon us, making it the perfect time to review examples of IT disasters that may rear their ugly heads during the season. While they can certainly strike at anytime, there are strong cases to be made for being especially mindful at this time of the year.
3 Specific IT Disasters that Businesses Need to Watch Out for on Halloween
I. Halloween Hackers
Hackers and cybercriminals are a mischievous bunch, and tend to gravitate their malicious activities around holidays when the assume (often correctly) that businesses have let their guard down. For this reason it makes sense that the annual Cyber Security Awareness Month concludes on the eve of each and every Halloween. Has your organization taken action by investing in better cyber security throughout the month? If not, you must take action right away because there have been upticks in certain types of cyber attacks of late, including C-level phishing, data mining, and especially attacks on your remote staff and contractors. Don’t fall for these tricks, and instead treat yourself to a cybersecurity audit from a trusted IT support provider.
II. Power Outages
While communities task electrical systems with Halloween lighting and animatronics, it’s not exactly enough to threaten the power grid that your warehouse or office space depends on for operational juice. So what is the risk? The weather in this region during this particular season.
Greater Vancouver BC experiences the most dramatic growth in wind storm activity as October gives way to November. For this reason, a larger number of power outages occur in the Lower Mainland in the days including and bookending October 31st. Have a look at the rising winds associated with this October to November transition:
(Average Weather in October in Vancouver – Source: WeatherSpark)
The threat of windstorms plateaus within the first week November, which makes the days around Halloween the most risky when it comes to this particular type of IT disaster.
Make sure that your business is prepared, and ensure that both your data and productivity tools are accessible via the cloud. If you have not yet migrated your IT systems to the cloud, you will need to act now before it’s too late.
III. Seasonal Sales Strain on Systems
This is a roundabout Halloween concern that some seasonal businesses may experience and assume to be a good problem to have. It’s also analogous for any business that experiences dramatic fluctuations to coincide with certain times of the year.
A seasonal sales strain on your IT systems may occur when a promotion drives a lot of traffic to your website and over-taxes your server/s, causing a slowdown or complete shutdown. The same is true of older POS systems, as high sales volumes at any given moment can crash the system. These are most certainly disasters that you cannot afford to happen, even if for an hour.
Whatever the case may be you need an IT expert to audit your IT systems to ensure that it can handle the increase in seasonal volume (be it traffic, sales, or pure usage based). This will require the integration of cloud-based scalable solutions, those that can scale-up when needed, and scale-down when needed. This will not only ensure smooth operational flow, it will keep things financially efficient.
View more on our data backup and disaster recovery services and contact SAV Technology today to keep IT disasters from happening to your business, no matter the time of the year.