Unit 5 Discussion: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Billy11
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Organizations have millions invested in computing resources. In the event of a disaster, an organization must have strong and secure plans in place to minimize losses. This can be done through business continuity planning and disaster recovery. This week we will discuss how business continuity and disaster recovery are connected. What are the potential threats? What are the potential solutions to best mitigate loss?
Be sure to use at least 2 external sources and to include all of your sources by providing citations/links to the Web pages you used in APA format.
POST 1
DR Plans
DR plans should be setup and tested before anything happens to the company data. You could setup multiple offsite backup plans, which would be the best solution for recovering data. The first step would consist of documentation, because your IT staff would need to know the plan. Network security should be a priority for the company, but even the best security setup can be compromised. This would be the main reason you would setup a DR plan for the company, and there are couple of different ways you could plan for.
Backup Plans
NAS box would be a good recovery plan, because it would give a cloud backup of your data. The NAS box would help mitigate the loss, which is due to the mirrored drive available for hardware. Cloud storage is a good option for a DR plan, because the company could have their data stored offsite. AWS has a lot of options that would get you started, and that would help mitigate the loss as well. Site replication is a part of Windows Server, but it does allow you to copy across the network to other servers. It would help with the in-house data, which could be sent to the cloud as well. I personally like to create an image of my OS, which would be a good option for a company. There are many way to mitigate the loss, but you need to go with the best option available.
Security
Firewalls will always be the first line of defense, because that's how you would keep attackers out the network. Training employees would be the second step, because it only takes one email to gives attackers access. The offsite backups would help with the recovery of the data, but security will always be an issue.
Reference
Matt. H (Jan, 2019).NAS devices Retrieved by:
POST 2
“Business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) are closely related practices that support an organization’s ability to remain operational after an adverse event.” (Rouse 2009). Basically, after an unexpected interruption, how well is the organization able to recover and run as close to “normal” as possible? There are numerous potential threats that can cause an organization to experience an unexpected interruption. Some of these threats are typical such as failure of IT systems, utility failure (power outages), and human threats such as viruses. Other threats that aren’t so “typical” are natural disasters, such as earthquakes and floods. This is where BC/DR comes into play. But companies do need to incorporate potential solutions to best mitigate loss. “Organize a business continuity committee to be in charge of creating the disaster recovery plan, as well as executing and evaluating as necessary. Establish a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for any IT systems identified during this process.” Being able to plan, schedule, and execute these plans and incorporate any ongoing process changes are of high importance.
This statement really sums it up and hits the nail on the head: “As cyber threats increase and the tolerance for downtime decreases, business continuity and disaster recovery gain importance” (Rouse 2009)
References
Rouse, M. (2009). Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. Retrieved April 26, 2019, from https://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/definition/Business-Continuity-and-Disaster-Recovery-BCDR (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
UnitedLayer. (2014). A Guide to Business Continuity and Planning Disaster Recovery Solutions. Retrieved April 26, 2019, from https://www.unitedlayer.com/sites/default/files/ul-disasterrecoveryguide.pdf (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
