Systems Availability and Business Continuity

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Systems Availability and Business Continuity
Raval Fichadia John Wiley Sons, Inc. 2007

• Chapter Four
• Prepared by Raval, Fichadia

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Chapter Four Objectives

1. Understand system availability and business
   continuity, and recognize differences between the
   two.
2. Comprehend incident response systems and their
   role in achieving the system availability
   objective.
3. Explain disaster recovery planning objectives and
   its, design, implementation and testing
   requirements.
4. Comprehend the link between business continuity
   and disaster recovery.
5. Understand the role of backup and recovery in
   disaster recovery plans.

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Power outage at Northwest Airlines

• Thunderstorm and lightening at the datacenter
  location caused the problem.
• Systems, down initially, operated in a degraded
  manner the next morning.
• Took very long to check people in flights.
• NWA triggered manual processes. Lines became
  longer and so did the delays in departure.
• Arrivals were late, but the departures from gates
  at the destination airport made the flights to
  wait before they could get to the gate.
• NWA announced an embargo, limiting itself to what
  it can handle under the circumstances.

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System Availability and Business Continuity

• System availability assures you that business
  will continue to operate.
• Business continuity is necessary for systems to
  add value on an ongoing basis.
• The issues of business continuity and systems
  availability are related and even overlap to a
  degree.

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Incident Response

• Incident A level of interruption in the system
  availability that appears to be temporary.
• An incident can be triggered by an accidental
  action by an authorized user, it may result from
  a threat.
• Incidents may be detected by
• End-users who may describe the symptom but not
  the cause.
• Those monitoring systems and processes may detect
  anomalies which lead to an incident that has
  occurred.
• Attack A series of steps taken by an attacker to
  achieve an unauthorized result.
• Event An action directed at a target that is
  intended to result in a change of state, or
  status, of the target.
• An event consists of an action and a target.

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Nature of Response to an Incident

• Assess the business significance of the
  incidents impact.
• Identify critical business processes that might
  have been compromised.
• Determine the root causes of the incident. This
  might present a challenge, for every incident
  could be of a different variety. The team may
  need to consult experts from outside the team.
• Training in forensics could help the team collect
  and evaluate evidence systematically.
• Standard procedures must be followed for
  restoring the affected systems and processes,
  instead of ad hoc, one-off attempts to restore
  what is compromised or lost.

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Preventive Measures

• Prevention is better and could be more cost
  effective - than a cure.
• Preventive measures require an anticipation or
  prediction of what might happen in terms of
  incidents and consequent compromises.
• Lessons learned from the organizations and from
  others experiences can help design and implement
  effective preventive measures.

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Incident Response Team

• A multi-skilled group, since the incident may be
  any variety and may impact almost any information
  asset.
• May include representation from human resources,
  legal, information systems, networks and
  communications, physical security, information
  security, and public relations.
• A top management team member may be designated as
  a direct contact for counseling and support.

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CERT

• CERT stands for Computer Emergency Readiness
  Team.
• Also called CERT Coordination Center (CERT CC),
  it is the Internets official emergency team.
• Provides alerts and offers incident handling and
  avoidance guidelines.
• Is located at Carnegie-Mellon University.
• www.cert.org

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Disaster Recovery

• Disaster An event that causes a significant and
  perhaps prolonged disruption in system
  availability.
• Disasters can be man-made or natural.
• Man-made disasters can be malicious or
  unintentional.
• Disaster recovery is a systematic effort to
  recover from the impact of a disaster.
• Best way to understand recovery is by focusing on
  post-disaster phases.
• Post-disaster phases
• Immediate response
• Near-term resumption
• Recovery toward normalization
• Restoration to pre-disaster state

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Phase Immediate Response Near-term resumption Recovery toward normalization Restoration to pre-disaster state
Objective Address emergency situation only. Resume operations at any level possible. Expand operations and extend capabilities and functionalities. Return as close to the original (pre-disaster) state as possible.
Example Event A logic bomb destroyed the operating system and customer data. Call customers whose orders are yet to be filled. Determine the current state of the system and data. Call in backup tapes and equipment to a warm site. Begin manual processing of critical orders. Install equipment, load operating system and applications, restore data, and test outputs. Switch to automated processing. Expand the order processing cycle. Increase the functionality (e.g. report generation). Load operating system, data, and applications at the original site. Pre-test. Resume processing in a parallel run with the warm site. Cut over to the original site. Fold operations at the warm site and return the equipment.
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Timeliness of Action and Value of Recovery

• Timeliness of action
• The timeline of actions planned should reflect
  value of the action at the time.
• Certain steps can wait while others must be taken
  without delay, to minimize losses.
• Value of recovery
• Timeliness of action reflects value of the
  recovery target.
• Considering this, recovery tasks should be
  systematically assigned to each post-disaster
  phase.

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Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP)

• DRP The definition of business processes, their
  infrastructure supports and tolerances to
  interruptions, and formulation of strategies for
  reducing the likelihood of interruption or its
  consequences.
• Component steps of DRP
• Define the process
• Identify what supports the process and its
  tolerance to interruptions
• Determine and implement strategies that would
  reduce the likelihood and cosequences of
  interruptions.

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Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP)

• Assessing potential losses Disaster Impact
  Analysis
• What disasters the firm is likely to face?
• What is the probability of each type of disaster?
• What is the impact of the disaster on the firm?

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Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP)

• Value-based recovery planning
• Definition of criticality and criteria to
  determine criticality
• Identification of critical business processes and
  their supports
• Identification of the role of information systems
  resources in the critical process
• Determination of process owners and process
  customers
• Determination of the amount of time the business
  can survive without the process post-disaster
• Identify interdependencies between the process
  and the rest of the business processes and
  systems
• To find critical processes, consider attributes
  such as importance, key users, tolerance to
  outage, waiting time between cycles, possibility
  of data recovery.

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Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP)

• Disaster recovery strategies
• How do we recover a system given its priority?
• Address the question by system components.
• Data (e.g., designate off-site storage)
• Processing (e.g., backup and store offsite
  current copies of the software)
• Network and communication (e.g., backup and store
  offsite a copy the current network configuration)
• Dependencies with other systems (e.g., identify
  how these processes will be interfaced
  post-disaster)

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DRP Recovery Locations

• Recovery location A site(s) where processes and
  systems will be recovered post-disaster.
• Hot sites Near-perfect replicas of the
  operations.
• Cold sites Just the infrastructure (computer
  operations room, platform for installing
  hardware, power and communication lines, cabling,
  etc.).
• Warm sites More than just a cold site, but not
  quite as ready as a hot site. For example, it
  may include commonly used computers and operating
  system.
• Reciprocal agreements Sharing of similar
  resources by those in the same or similar
  computing enviornments.
• Colocations Recovery is planned using
  availability of computing resources at the firms
  many locations.

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DRP Teams

• Purpose of forming teams is to ensure that
  recovery tasks are accomplished in an orderly and
  responsible manner.
• The number and nature of teams could vary across
  organizations.
• However, each team should include knowledge and
  skills necessary to perform its assigned tasks.
• Recovery teams can be organized by recovery
  phases.
• Flexibility in assignments is necessary, for an
  actual disaster may need adjustments to the team.
  Non-availability of some team members when
  disaster strikes is also likely.

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DRP Disaster Readiness

• Meaning of readiness Having the assurance that
  if and when a disaster strikes, the firm has a
  high likelihood of recovering from the disaster.
  Testing of the plan is crucial to get this
  assurance. Disaster readiness practices include
• Walkthroughs Having a plan preparer walk though
  others to show how the plan leads from point A to
  point B.
• Rehearsals An as-if exercise to simulate a
  disasters impact and have people responsible
  recreate recovery of lost processes and
  systems.
• Compliance (Live) testing Actual test of
  recovery with a simulated disaster.

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Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

• BCP The totality of plans made to recover the
  business operations following a disaster.
• Recovery of all operations is involved, not just
  information assets.
• Methods and strategies adopted for BCP are
  comparable to, and often overlap with, those used
  in DRP.

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Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

• Business impact analysis is an exercise in risk
  assessment.
• Identify vulnerabilities of the firm.
• Assess the business impact
• Focus on a particular disaster and determine
  processes that might be affected, and/or
• Analyze all business processes to assess probable
  business impact in the event that a disaster
  strikes.
• Initiate a planning process to develop methods
  and strategies to mitigate risk.
• Business recovery
• Approaches and methods for business recovery are
  similar to those discussed in disaster recovery
  planning.

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Assurance Considerations

• Any assurance that BCP/DRP will be effective
  requires an examination of such plans from three
  angles
• Method Review the method followed in the
  development of the plan. A sound planning
  process make possible a plan that is complete and
  reliable.
• Content Should have been collected from right
  participants, and the instruments and methods
  used to collect data must be valid. The plan
  should be current.
• Testing Critical components of the plan should
  be tested, results should be documented, and
  corrective action, where necessary, should follow.

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