Classification of Disasters
Disaster can be classified in two broad categories.
- Natural disasters- Preventing a natural disaster is very difficult, but it is possible to take precautions to avoid losses. These disasters include flood, fire, earthquake, hurricane, etc
- Man made disasters- These disasters are major reasons for failure. Human error and intervention may be intentional or unintentional which can cause massive failures such as loss of communication and utility. These disasters include accidents, walkouts, sabotage, burglary, virus, intrusion, etc.
General steps to follow while creating BCP/DRP
- Identify the scope and boundaries of business continuity plan. First step enables us to define scope of BCP. It provides an idea for limitations and boundaries of plan. It also includes audit and risk analysis reports for institution’s assets.
- Conduct a business impact analysis (BIA). Business impact analysis is the study and assessment of effects to the organization in the event of the loss or degradation of business/mission functions resulting from a destructive event. Such loss may be financial, or less tangible but nevertheless essential (e.g. human resources, shareholder liaison)
- Sell the concept of BCP to upper management and obtain organizational and financial commitment. Convincing senior management to approve BCP/DRP is key task. It is very important for security professionals to get approval for plan from upper management to bring it to effect.
- Each department will need to understand its role in plan and support to maintain it. In case of disaster, each department has to be prepared for the action. To recover and to protect the critical functions, each department has to understand the plan and follow it accordingly. It is also important for each department to help in the creation and maintenance of its portion of the plan.
- The BCP project team must implement the plan. After approval from upper management plan should be maintained and implemented. Implementation team should follow the guidelines procedures in plan.
- NIST tool set can be used for doing BCP. National Institute of Standards and Technologies has published tools which can help in creating BCP.
Control measures in recovery plan
Control measures are steps or mechanisms that can reduce or eliminate computer security threats. Different types of measures can be included in BCP/DRP.
- Preventive measures – These controls are aimed at preventing an event from occurring.
- Detective measures – These controls are aimed at detecting or discovering unwanted events.
- Corrective measures – These controls are aimed at correcting or restoring the system after disaster or event.
These controls should be always documented and tested regularly.
Strategies
Prior to selecting a disaster recovery strategy, a disaster recovery planner should refer to their organization’s business continuity plan which should indicate the key metrics of recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for various business processes (such as the process to run payroll, generate an order, etc). The metrics specified for the business processes must then be mapped to the underlying IT systems and infrastructure that support those processes.
Once the RTO and RPO metrics have been mapped to IT infrastructure, the DR planner can determine the most suitable recovery strategy for each system. An important note here however is that the business ultimately sets the IT budget and therefore the RTO and RPO metrics need to fit with the available budget. While most business unit heads would like zero data loss and zero time loss, the cost associated with that level of protection may make the desired high availability solutions impractical.
The following is a list of the most common strategies for data protection.
- Backups made to tape and sent off-site at regular intervals (preferably daily)
- Backups made to disk on-site and automatically copied to off-site disk, or made directly to off-site disk
- Replication of data to an off-site location, which overcomes the need to restore the data (only the systems then need to be restored or synced). This generally makes use of storage area network (SAN) technology
- High availability systems which keep both the data and system replicated off-site, enabling continuous access to systems and data
In many cases, an organization may elect to use an outsourced disaster recovery provider to provide a stand-by site and systems rather than using their own remote facilities.
In addition to preparing for the need to recover systems, organizations must also implement precautionary measures with an objective of preventing a disaster in the first place. These may include some of the following:
- Local mirrors of systems and/or data and use of disk protection technology such as RAID
- Surge protectors — to minimize the effect of power surges on delicate electronic equipment
- Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and/or backup generator to keep systems going in the event of a power failure
- Fire preventions — alarms, fire extinguishers
- Anti-virus software and other security measures
