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What is a realistic level of disaster are you facing? Disasters can include:

  • Power outages, possibly for days or weeks. Remind me how renewables are backed up on windless nights and how often do wind droughts occur? Work it out here: https://anero.id/energy
  • Flooding from either outside the building or pluming problems inside.
  • Severe weather events - storms, floods, bush fires etc.
  • Loss of WAN connectivity, eg. building works cutting the data cable.
  • Disk, server, switch or router failure.
  • Mistakes by IT staff. This is a very common cause of outages and data loss and is often followed by the blame game. New staff and contractors usually lose the blame game.
  • Malware, virus, worm, cryptolocker etc.
  • Damage by hackers: Pranksters, competitors, cyber activism (not woke enough, or too woke, or the social media post that has inflamed activists) or state actors.
  • Civil unrest after a controversial election result.
  • Say and employee was running an illegal Dark Web site from your data centre and the police turned up and seized all the servers? - Servers on the TOR network are easier to set up than you might think.
  • There is the risk of another pandemic, maybe the next one is more deadly?
  • The risk of war should not be underestimated. There are plenty of conflicts simmering in the world. Middle East, Ukraine, Taiwan etc. Remember that this could include the cutting of undersea cables to isolate Australia from the world Internet and this could affect SaaS products, cloud computing and software that needs to dial home regularly to reauthorise its license.
  • War can include cyberwar, terrorism, regional warfare not involving Australia, regional war involving Australia, an EMP attack, through to a World War with nuclear weapons.
  • Sabotage of equipment or data theft by a disgruntled employee. Data theft is very common by staff going to a job with a competitive employer.

If you had been told in mid-2019 that you needed a robust pandemic plan you probably would have thought it was unrealistically improbable? That there was a risk of an illegal bioweapon escaping from a Chinese weapons research facility that would kill millions of people, sounds more like science fiction, or a plot from a B Grade spy movie.

Mark Ellis

Cyber Security Consultant

Citrix Consultant

Digital Harmony Australia Pty Ltd

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