Question

What alternatives could a small business (restaurant) consider if one of the server stations should malfunction?

Answer 1

STRATEGIES TO DEAL WITH SERVER FAILUREs IN SMALL ORGANIZATION

Server failure is a common issue that affects organizations of all types and sizes. Server failures can lead to operation issues, service outages and repair costs. Potential causes of server failures can be internal or external hazards, inclusing:

· Overheating

· Hardware issues

· Software issues

· Network issues

· System overload

· Cyber attack

· Human error

· Natural disaster

· Viruses, Trojans, and worms

· Accidents

· Attacks

To prevent common server failures, the following preventive measures can be taken:

· Ensure optimal environment temperature

· Fire protection and utilities

· Use of failure safety high reliable standard servers and server components

· Secure defense systems

· Conduct routine maintenance

· Regularly install updates

· Maintain strict access control and detailed event logs

· Monitor performance trends.

· Data backup and recovery

· Information security training to system personnel

· Develop a server contingency plan.

· Design a disaster and data recovery plan.

Even small business organizations like restaurants can implement many of these server failure preventive measures. Irrespective of the strong preventive measures taken, server stations can still fail due to occurrences unforeseen or unexpected events or disasters. Thus, the organizations must have server contingency plan and data recovery plan to recover from server failures and possible loss of valuable data.

Redundancy is a big component to prevent downtime from server failure. A server contingency plan should establish available secondary hardware such as multiple power sources, redundant RAM and backup servers. In the event of server failure and data loss, data recovery plan will save the organization from long downtime and catastrophic data loss. Having a backup plan is essential even for small organizations to deal with the worst-case scenarios.

There are different strategies to effectively deal with sever failure and its recovery, including:

· A restart of the server can some time solve the problem

· Switch to a back-up server

· Use diagnosis software to narrow down the possible causes and switch to a backup server and take the necessary steps to repair the server failure.