Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

• Business continuity: a collection of processes enabling an organization to maintain normal business operations after an adverse event
• Adverse events may be brought about by malice or carelessness, and can result in:
  • Loss or leakage of data
  • Damage to property
  • Breakdown of communications
  • Harm to personnel
• Disaster recovery: a major component of business continuity that focuses on recovering assets after a disaster
• Ensures IT environment is brought back to a working baseline level

The Disaster Recovery Process

• Notify stakeholders, including senior management, board members, investors, and clients
• Determine extent of damage to property and estimate downtime
• Assess the cause of the disaster if unclear
• Determine appropriate response strategy
• Determine if facility should still be primary center of operations

Recovery Team

• A group of designated individuals who implement recovery procedures
• Immediately responds in an emergency
• Restores critical business processes to normal operating capacity
• May include systems managers, admins, security specialists, facility specialists, communications specialists, HR staff, and legal representatives

Order of Restoration

• A process that dictates what types of systems to prioritize during disaster recovery
• Triage the damage done to prioritize critical systems
• Can be customized to fit business needs
• Example: restore clean, dry conditions to datacenter, then restore power, internal networking, storage and processing servers, and finally inbound and outbound network connectivity

Recovery Sites

• Hot site: a fully configured alternate network that can be quickly brought online after a disaster
• Warm site: a location that can be rapidly converted to a key operations site
• Cold site: a predetermined alternate location where a network can be rebuilt after a disaster

Secure Recovery

• Must include processes for securely recovering sensitive resources
• Processes may include:
  • Designating a trusted admin to supervise recovery
  • Documenting steps used to restore processes, systems, and data
  • Instructions for continuing operations at alternate recovery site
  • Reviewing and testing the recovery process regularly

Backup Types

• Full backup: all files backed up, high storage space and slow backup, quick to recover
• Differential backup: all files that have changed since last full backup, less storage space and less time to perform, slower to recover
• Incremental backup: all files that have changed since last backup, less storage space and less time to perform, slowest to recover

Secure Backups

• Backups must be secured to prevent environmental damage and accidental overwriting
• Secure backups are offline and offsite, in a locked location, accurately labeled, and protected against environmental damage
• Having multiple backups requires additional security and consideration for integrity and potential file corruption