New Technology Reviews!.: Continuity

Disaster recovery planning and preventive measures ensure business continuity. The main question is "What if an attacker succeeds and renders an organization's functions impossible?" Whether the break in business continuity is a short or long one, this is where an organization's disaster recovery plans comes into play. The disaster recovery plans define the resources, actions, and data required to reinstate critical business processes that have been damaged or disabled because of a disaster. By focusing on disaster recovery plans and preventions, network managers can minimize the impact that catastrophic events may have in their environment. The recovery plan is the best way to insure that a business survives an IT emergency.The various potential disasters that security administrators need to be concerned about can be classified as human induced incidents, natural, internal, armed conflict, and external. Human induced incidents can include loss of power, transportation accidents, and chemical contaminations. Natural incidents can include flood, earthquake, and tornado. Internal incidents include sabotage, theft, and employee violence. Armed conflict can include acts of terrorism, like the 911 attacks, civil unrest, and war. External incidents include hacking, unauthorized use, and industrial espionage.Organizations identify potential threats and analyze what needs to be achieved in order to continue operating as though nothing had happened. After identifying these potential threats, security administrators can be in a better position to protect the mission-critical information systems.Data backup is an essential part of any disaster recovery plan. Data backup allows personnel to restore files and application software that is vital to continue business. An effective data backup strategy should address how often backups are run, type of backup medium, when the backups are run, are backups automated or manual, backup verification, storage, who is responsible for the backups, and the fallback person responsible for backups. Addressing the need for off-site storage may also be an important guideline for organizations with extensive business-critical data (Boswell..., 2003 p. 433).Organizations must include thorough planning and testing and include provisions for business continuity. Anticipating disasters is the first in the process. There is a lot to be learned and corrected from the testing phase and it needs to be taken very seriously. The testing exercise helps minimize losses during an actual attack. An effective disaster recovery plan should include the following documents: a list of covered disasters, a list of the disaster recovery team members, a business impact assessment, a business resumption and continuity plan, backup documentation, and restoration documentation.It has been said that the most important step in managing potential disasters is to have in place a well-trained and ready to respond team including a member from senior management, members of the IT department, representatives from facilities management, and representatives from the user community affected by the crisis. In a real crisis, the disaster recovery team meets to evaluate and determine the sources of the disaster and identify the critical components that are affected. The team than assesses the business impact of the disaster, estimating how long the disaster may disrupt business continuity. In this process the cost of the disaster is also ascertained. Exhaustively documenting changes that are implemented during the rush to solve the problem is also crucial.It is also important that organizations show their commitment to these plans that come from the IS department by adopting well-defined security policies and human resource policies that reflects their support to information security. A useful and well-written security policy should include sections on acceptable use, privacy, due care, separation of duties, "need-to-know" issues, password management, service-level agreements, and the destruction or disposal of information and storage media (Boswell..., 2003 p. 437). Human resources policy deals with personnel management. There should be thorough hiring practices including background, reference, and educational checks. To minimize a security risk, employees should have periodic reviews and rotate job functions and duties, which is beneficial in an emergency due to the more even distribution of information. Employee termination practices are also important in the protection and prevention of threats. Exit interviews should be conducted, individuals should be escorted off the property, and the terminated employee's computer accounts and passwords should be deactivated and changed. A code of ethics should also be included in an organization's human resources policy. This would help define and clarify the company's stance on information security and provide a foundation built on ethics (Boswell..., 2003 p. 441).An incident response policy can also play a critical role. This policy covers how to deal with a security incident after it has occurred. Following a sound incident response methodology lessens the likelihood that incompetent and inefficient actions will occur and contributes to the practice of due care. An incident response policy should follow the steps of preparation (being ready before an incident occurs), detection (recognizing the presents of malicious code or whether files have been altered), containment (preventing further loss or disruption of services), eradication (removing viruses or malicious code along with cleaning and reformatting hard drives that were affected), recovery (restoring the system), and follow up (develop set of lessons learned) (Boswell..., 2003 p. 442).In conclusion, in is important to combine a disaster recovery plan with a well-defined and documented security policy, human resources policy, and incident response policy, which can minimize the effects of a catastrophic event and help assure business continuity. It is said, "Failure to prepare is preparing to fail."Works Cited Boswell, S., Calvert, B., Campbell, P. (2003). Security + Guide to Network Security Fundamentals. Boston, Massachusetts: Thomson Course Technology.	 	 		 			 				 					 						Joshua Maluchnik, M.I.T., MCP/MCTS Account Manager | Sales Engineer Tranztec Solutions, Inc. <a href="http://www.tranztec.com" target="_new">http://www.tranztec.com</a>

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Disaster recovery planning and preventive measures ensure business continuity. The main question is "What if an attacker succeeds an...

Business should always have a continuity disaster recovery plan to survive any setbacks that can happen. Most of the modern businesses today have switched and relied on digital technology to run their database and processes. This means that most companies today value their database equally with their assets because it is a tool reference for their business systems. Without the database, the business operations can concur big losses because they have to rebuild their processes all over again which will need further costs or capital.Planning, production, purchase, and even billing have been served using computer processing that lessens the paperwork and save the most precious component of business which is time. When time is saved, production can double and this means more profit in a shorter length of time for any business. Now, if you do not have a good defense against error or loss of database, then it will definitely take time to rebuild the whole business systems. Meanwhile, if you made sure you have your continuity disaster recovery invested, then recovery period would only take a few hours or days and you get your business up and running again in no time.To make the illustration more easy to relate, just imagine if your accountant has lost all their files of your business billing, purchasing, payroll and other expenses and earnings in their computer. This can happen usually with honest mistakes never unintentional most of the times. Virus infection, hacking, or other technical reasons can be the main causes of the database breakdown.How do you think you have the other means of recovering the data stored for a few years or months in just days? That can never happen and to most it will take forever to recover the lost data for the company to be operational again. This is because your list of clients, outstanding payable, collections, and other flow of cash history has to be manually encoded into data from the receipts or other reliable documents. This is a scenario you do not want to happen in your company.That is why most corporations hire separate IT professionals in handling, protecting, and trouble shooting their digital databases. These professionals can cost extra service or payroll charges but you are always reassured of a fast continuity disaster recovery. But do remember that they are the experts in combating threats and building protection for your company database. The data that your business accumulate should always have a back up and is aptly protected by firewalls and anti-hacking security measures to prevent theft, crash, or deletion of your company database.Nowadays, your business might be paying for information. What you should also be remembering is that you have information and data that others might find valuable. So information is also an aspect of business that is integral and to be treated as part of a company assets. It is always better to be prepared to lessen losses and keep any possible setback from totally ruining your business. Be wise and consider data recovery and protection as part of the components of your business.	 	 		 			 				 					 						Tiffany R. Welch enjoys writing for Thorscbradio.com which sells <a href="http://www.thorscbradio.com/cb-radio.html" target="_new">cb radios</a> and <a href="http://www.thorscbradio.com/cb-radio.html" target="_new">cb radio</a> as well as a host of additional products.

Business Database Continuity Disaster Recovery

Business should always have a continuity disaster recovery plan to survive any setbacks that can happen. Most of the modern businesses to...