Instituition
1.What are the steps in the business continuity planning process?Why is a clear understanding of company's architecture critical to this process?
Creation of road map: This identifies where the company is now and where it wants to be in the future.
Identification of risks in critical systems of both IT and business and establishing the level of acceptable risk.
Planning the budget: This clearly demonstrates various activities needed to be performed ,the time duration required for completion of activities,the expenditure involved.
Listing and rating of threats which threaten company's survival. This step demystifies the threats and in the process they are approached and resolved.
Strengthening the systems: This step involves identifying the working systems and processes and strengthening them. They are made more productive,dependable and tough.
Thinking outside the box: An outside expert can observe what has been overlooked by the company insiders. He brings afresh perspective to the working of the company. He complements the efforts of the organizations in finding the ways a disaster can strike and identifies their vulnerabilities which can be either technology or processes.He can also point out strategies which have loopholes.(The six key stages of a phased business continuity planning process)
An enterprise architecture is the model that defines the architecture and activities of the organization.The goal of enterprise architecture is to find out the methods for achieving effectively the current and future objectives. Therefore to achieve success in business continuity planning,one has to have a thorough knowledge of enterprise architecture.
(Enterprise architecture)
2. Describe the differences between the hot,warm and cold site methods of facility recovery.
The disaster recovery plan must be more detailed than simple data backup programs. A network outage can severely impact critical business systems. An appropriate level of redundancy is to be maintained to allow for resumption of business processes at the earliest.
Part of the disaster recovery plan must contain the level of backup necessary to be maintained to minimize impacts of outages on uptime. Disaster recovery sites are of three types: Hot sites, cold sites, and warm sites.
Hot sites:These are mirrors of data center infrastructure. It has servers, cooling, power, and office space . The most important feature is that all activities are running concurrently with the main data center. This synchronization causes minimum impact and downtime to business activities. If there is a serious outage to main data center with the work stopped, the hot site takes over the work immediately. This level of redundancy is expensive, and businesses will have to consider the cost-benefit-analysis of using the hot site.
Cold site: This is basically data center space without any equipment installed. It provides power, cooling, and/or office space and can begin operations when the primary center has stopped working due to outage. The cold site requires massive support from engineering and IT personnel to acquire necessary servers and equipment and begin functioning. These are the economical cost-recovery option for businesses to use.
Warm site is in between the above two disaster recovery options. They offer office space/data center space and have few pre-installed server hardware ready for the installation of production environments. They are useful for non critical business,but require a certain level of redundancy. A cost benefit analysis conducted in comparing warm site and hot site must include the downtime related to software loading. (Carroll,2013)
References
1.The six key stages of a phased business continuity planning process. (2014, August 1). Retrieved from http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature1209.html
2. Enterprise architecture. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/enterprise-architecture
3. Carroll, B. (2013, November 20). The Three Stages of Disaster Recovery Sites. Retrieved from http://www.seguetech.com/blog/2013/11/20/three-stages-disaster-recovery-sites
