With companies relying so heavily on technology, business continuity is essential to mitigate loss and ensure survival. Business continuity and disaster recovery solutions are designed to protect a firm from any form of disruption and get technology, people, and network back in business quickly.
Resource: Modern Disaster Recovery Workshop: Developing an IT Disaster Recovery Plan
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuibH0n6W9s
After watching the provided video, create your original post by answer one/two of the following questions:
– What should a CEO do when a disaster strikes?
– How should a business determine to what extent of a disaster they should be planning for?
– What are some new technologies for business continuity?
Feel free to share any other videos you may find and any other document that may clarify these relevant concepts. This discussion offers you the opportunity to express your own thoughts, ask questions for clarification, and gain insight from your classmates’ responses and instructor’s guidance.
Requirements
You are required to post one (1) initial post and to follow up with at least two (2) response posts. For your initial post (1), you must compose a post of one to two paragraphs by Friday, December 15th at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time.
For your response posts (2), you must reply to at least two different classmates outside of your own initial post thread by Tuesday, December 19th at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time. Please, demonstrate more depth and thought than simply stating “I agree” or “You are wrong.”
Integrated rubric in Blackboard:
Eassy 1. When assessing potential disaster threats, a business should focus on two aspects: their geographical location and who the attacker may be. Depending on location, businesses have different natural disasters to be concerned with. In the north, water, delivered through winds and flooding, is a major issue. The winter in the north is of utmost concern as water may enter outside fans known as condensers and freeze from within, thus stopping the airflow that cools the data center. Southern and western locations face quite the opposite natural disaster: droughts. Droughts cause large amounts of dust that can clog up the air, and the lack of water is a major concern as none can be fed through A/C systems. Similar to such air problems, the Northeast is also concerned with volcanoes throwing ash into the air and affecting data centers. Secondly, businesses must decipher whether the threat is a malicious user or a genuine user with accidental error. A malicious user may be a hacker or a previous employer, most of which will employ a serious of attacks, including a search for firewall holes, employing a phishing attack, or in the case of a previous employee, utilizing back door attacks. When it comes to genuine users, human error is the issue. One may simply miss a hole in software that should have been fixed; although not a malicious attack, it is a concern all the same. By analyzing such disaster threats, a company should determine which DR plan to utilize.
Ideally, a CEO should be taking action to ensure an efficient disaster recovery prior to any disaster actually occurring. Pat O’Day compares DR to insurance, calling it a “necessary evil.” Thus, although it does not appear relevant to everyday business operations, the CEO should be ensuring that IT is routinely testing the plan to make sure that it still works up to the level necessary to keep operations running and to make sure that if any updates need to be run, they have the ability and time to do so. Now, when disaster truly does strike, depending on the DR plan that has been put into place, the CEO has limited options. If he only has a cold site, he needs to begin assembling applications as soon as possible as they will take days to completely reload, days during which business and revenue will be lost. If he has a frugal warm site, IT and employees should migrate to the recovery site and reboot all operations. If he has a local site, he should hope that the disaster did not affect both the original location and his back up site; assuming his site is safe, business will continue relatively quickly. In the case of a mission critical business and one with large capital dedicated to IT, the CEO will have little concern about the disaster affecting his database as he likely has an expensive hot site where all data is replicated and ready to be used. These scenarios and consequential options prove that a DR plan can determine largely how well a business regenerates, which is significant in terms of revenue, following a disaster.
Eassy 2. Preparing for a disaster is incredibly important, not only personally but for business as well. It is especially important for CEOs of big companies to come up with continuity plans that will keep a business running smoothly in the face of adversity. A business’ disaster plan should be good enough that when something does happen all a CEO must do is put it into action. When a business is deciding what events they need to be prepared for they should take multiple things into account. First, it is always important to keep cost in mind. In an ideal world, everyone will have a perfect backup of everything and will never have to worry. However, this is clearly not the case in the business nor real world. CEOs should plan to cover as much as possible while still maintaining a level of economic prowess that keeps costs to a reasonable amount.
You need to write 2 dependent comment for eassy1 and eassy2.
