‘Be grateful for the home you have, knowing that at this moment, all you have is all you need.’ | ||
| --Sarah Ban Breathnach | ||
As home PCs and Internet access have become more and more widespread, so the number of people working from home has increased enormously over the last few years. Whatever the size of your organization, it is almost inevitable that you have a number of people working from home, whether on a regular or occasional basis, from the CEO burning the midnight oil on the annual business plan, to sales people working up their Powerpoint presentations for a pitch the next morning to data-input teleworkers. In their own way, these people all expose the organization to risk of one sort or another. Any DR or BC plan must take account of this. This chapter outlines some of the risks to be taken into consideration.
Working at home brings with it various major and minor risks not usually associated with working in the office. Some of the key risks are:
Children and pets: they can cause problems if they can get access to business material. For example, the famous scientist Thomas Edison lost hundreds of his research papers due to a fire accidentally triggered by his pet dog.
Fire
Burglary and theft
Electrical short circuits
Power outages
... and other home-related disasters.
Whether you work at home yourself or whether you manage those who do, you need to take precautions. The following list is not exhaustive, so use it not just as a checklist but also as a prompt to help you analyse the risks and identify the appropriate measures to take.
Do not load games and other fancy stuff like free screensavers on your business computer at home. Just have the essential business applications. Freeware, shareware, games, etc, can cause freak problems and virus attacks.
Buy a reliable tape drive or backup device and back up your data regularly. More important, learn to restore and verify your backups.
Learn how to configure your Internet connection, install software, anti-virus programs, etc on your own.
Have a print-out of all important phone numbers, e-mail ids, vendor contacts, etc, and keep it updated periodically.
Have an anti-virus and firewall system to protect your computers and keep it updated. Home-based firewalls can be purchased for less than US$100.
Think about security. A survey in the UK claimed that hackers are gaining access to corporate networks by exploiting lax security on over 350,000 home workers' PCs connected to their work IT systems. According to the study, one in six PCs tested were completely without protection. With well over two million UK employees using their home PC to access work networks, it is possible that 350,000 employee PCs are acting as back doors for hackers to attack business networks.
Have your computers, printers, UPS, etc, under proper hardware maintenance contracts.
Download your business e-mail to your computer, but also retain a copy on the ISP server.
Have two e-mail IDs if possible, and configure e-mail ID1 to send a one-way copy of all e-mails to e-mail ID2 for backup purposes. Do not have a two way setup as it can crash the mailbox through the ping-pong effect.
Do not open attachments and other suspicious e-mails, which do not seem to be business related.
Scan important documents and store the images on a CD-Rom or disk.
Throughout the UK and Europe, and probably in numerous other countries, employers have legal responsibilities in relation to health and safety and other issues affecting any of their employees who work from home. In the UK, the Health and Safety Executive have published a free 12-page booklet on the subject; you can download it from: www.hse.gov.uk.
When working from home, use a separate room if possible. Keep all work documents, computers, diskettes, CD-Roms, phones, etc in a room that can be locked. Your child can easily ruin all your business documents for its colouring project or making some paper airplanes.
Ensure that the business room is fire-proof, water-proof, pest-proof and child-proof. It should also be clean and tidy.
Do not share your business computer with children, friends, relatives, etc – have a separate computer for them to use instead.
Ensure that important documents, and other business related materials, are out of reach of children.
Have a small fire extinguisher handy.
Have a UPS with adequate power backup.
Ensure that your electrical outlets are safe and properly earthed.
Review your insurance policies. Does your work insurance cover losses at home? Does working at home invalidate your personal and home insurance?
Do not leave laptops and other important business material in your car. If the car gets stolen, or mowed down by a truck, you will lose important data and you will probably not be able to claim under your insurance policies either.
Take any other safety precautions necessary depending on the unique nature of your work, your home, location, availability of support, etc.
Your home probably wasn’t designed to be a work environment too, so be careful about overloading the electricity supply with too many plugs and extension leads going into too few sockets. Avoid having leads trailing all over the place that you (or small children) can trip over. And try to ensure that your desk, table, workstation or whatever meets the basic health and safety advice: ergonomists recommend that you sit upright, not too close to the computer screen, with your elbows, hips, knees and ankles all at 90° angles.
If you work from home on a regular basis, decide how you are going to manage your documents and data. How do you take electronic files home – on disc, by e-mail, on a memory stick? And how do you take the updated versions back to the office – in the same way? It’s probably best to use a couple of methods. E-mail is fine for short documents, but if you’re doing a five-year business plan it’s a pain to have to e-mail large Excel spreadsheets which may be too big for your home e-mail system. Likewise, there’s nothing worse than staying up half the night to finish something, e-mailing it to your office and then getting in the next morning to find that the e-mail hasn’t worked for some reason. Memory sticks are an ideal solution to this sort of problem, but they can be a security risk themselves if you lose them.
Whatever solution you arrive at, you also need to think about how you update and synchronize documents that you use both at home and at work.
If your master files are all in the office, perhaps it doesn’t matter to you if you lose whatever you do at home. However, simple backup devices and methodologies are available to back up and restore individual computers. Some of the easy, tested and proven practices to ensure data backups are as follows.
Image backups: A computer can be fitted with two physical hard disks. Disk C: can be used for loading all required software, data, etc. This will be the primary business disk and the second hard disk can be used as a backup disk. The entire C: can be taken as an image file on to the D: drive. Special backup utilities like Norton’s Ghost can be used to transfer a snapshot of an entire hard disk on to another hard disk. If the primary disk fails then simply restoring the image can restore the computer back to its original condition. For example, suppose an image has been taken on 1st September at 3 pm. And suppose the primary disk crashes on 5th September. By restoring the image, the computer can be restored to the condition that it was in on 1st September at 3 pm. Depending on the periodicity of the backup, systems can be restored to the last available image state.
DVD backup: As an additional precaution, the entire image file or essential files can be backed up onto DVD or CD-Rom disks. Low-cost DVD writers are available for less than US$150 (or may even be installed on your machine already, as part of the start-up package).
USB disks: If only a few essential files have to be backed up then low cost USB disks ranging from 128 megabytes to 4 gigabytes are available in the cost range of US$50 to US$200. These disks are portable and easy to use but they will not help you to restore an entire computer.
Tape drives: Low cost tape drives are also available that can back up data ranging from 20 to 80 gigabytes. Such drives and accessories cost in the range of US$300 to US$500, depending on features and quality.
For large amounts of data backup it is better to have a combination of an image backup and a tape backup for complete safety. This will require three hard disks on the computer, if possible.
The C: drive can be for the operating system, necessary applications, backup software, desktop settings, etc. This disk should not be used to store any important data.
The D: drive can be used for taking an image backup of the C: drive. This disk should be reserved for the image file only.
The E: drive can be used to store all data. This drive can be backed up into tape. If the tape drive has enough capacity it can also take a backup of the image file, for additional precautions.
In the event of a disk crash the following methods can be used to restore the data.
If the C disk crashes, a new C disk can be plugged in and the last image file can be restored from D: to C. This will normally require a bootable floppy or a bootable CD-Rom.
If the D disk crashes, a new D disk can be plugged in and a new image backup of the C: drive can be backed up to the new D drive.
If the E disk crashes, a new E disk can be plugged in and the data restored from the tape drive. This is possible because the tape software will be available on the C drive.
Laptops: The above methods cannot be used on laptops, as it is not possible to have multiple hard disks on most laptops. Backing up laptops can be tricky as it is difficult to plug in tape drives and image disks. Some of the recommended methods are as follows.
USB disks can be used to take essential backups.
Use an external tape drive and REV drives like Iomega (www.iomega.com) that plug into the USB port for backup. Such devices have the option of creating a special bootable disk for creating an image backup of the entire hard disk. The user just boots from the floppy disk or bootable CD-rom that allows DOS or a manufacturer proprietary access to the tape drive. Next, an image utility like Norton’s Ghost can be used to take a snapshot of the entire hard disk. A regular and periodic image backup will ensure that the system is adequately protected.
However, if a laptop disk crashes restoring it to its original state will involve some hassles and may require help from external vendors specializing in data recovery jobs. Such vendors have specialized devices that can extract data from failed hard disks, though they may not always be successful.
An alternative is a web-based backup service. This installs a small programme on the laptop that will automatically back up changes to data across the Internet to an offsite backup centre. You can then restore the data from this centre if you need to. An example of this sort of service is www.datadepositbox.com.