In recent months, there have been numerous warnings over the internet and media about the dangers of Ransomware. The need to be protected against the brutal impact it can have on your business is critical. As consultants, we talk about this with our clients and remind them of the value we can deliver to help protect against these attacks.
We often see clients relying on their internal IT staff or outsourcing their IT operations to a local firm to help them prevent against hacking, ransomware and other cyber/data breaches. It is crucial for any companies with a network environment to be extremely diligent about this due to the devastating impact it can have on your business operations and the ability for you to maintain customer satisfaction.
How Ransomware Affects Your Business Operations
In less than an hour, their entire ERP solution, that was supported by three servers, was completely infected, rendering their entire operation useless. To make the situation worse, their database backup had not occurred in several months, and this led to:
inability to process orders via their ERP environment (some days they received over 500 orders)
lost more than $5,000 in new orders daily because they could not process orders quickly
lost visibility of their inventory availability
lost visibility to their replenishment routines to get new inventory in for shipment
lost visibility to accounts receivables and payables
everything became manual: paper, pen and many overhead hours were incurred to complete simple tasks
lost all customer and order information from the time of the last backup to present day.
Revenue impact is untold because it is not truly known exactly how much data was lost since the last backup.
lost all vendor information, open purchase orders, open invoices etc.
The Cost of Ransomware Attacks
Not only was their business on the brink of disaster but the damages took a toll on their workforce and company finances. Their employees had to run their business manually which took them 600 man hours over a 6-day period. From a cost perspective, the owner estimated the damages cost his business more than $100,000, excluding the return business from customers that were lost because of the incident.
The business owner was in a state of significant distress as his business was severely broken. We helped them with a complete assessment of the damages and performed a complete system rebuild so they could get back to their regular business fast. To completely assess and implement a recovery program, it cost them approximately $32,000.
This could have been prevented.
Protecting Your Business Against Ransomware
Is it necessary to have a well thought out and executed virus protection plan? Obviously, the answer is yes. But as important, you should review whether internal IT staff or outsourced IT has the right the game plan to protect your business.
Lastly, be sure to adopt a regular backup routine to prevent data loss. While even the best-planned virus protection may not ultimately save your company from a nasty virus, a constant database backup will prevent your business from being on the brink of no return. You will recover and be up and running as normal much faster.
