Business Continuity in a Cyber World by David Sutton

Author:David Sutton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Business Expert Press
Published: 2018-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

Major Business Continuity Solutions to Cyber Issues

While some activities will be relatively minor, not only in time and effort but also in the level of change of impact or likelihood, others will be considerably more time-consuming and costly, and will have a much greater effect upon resilience.

Power is the life blood of the organization’s IT systems, and the prolonged loss of it will have a devastating impact on the organization’s ability to remain in business. Power resilience is best provided by combining two pieces of technology. The first is the uninterruptible power source (UPS), which consists of a system that can detect the loss of power—often by sensing slight changes in voltage or frequency—and switching automatically to a battery-backed inverter system. This is generally of limited capacity, designed to hold up power while the second system comes into operation—the standby generator which will take over the load and maintain power indefinitely subject to the ongoing availability of fuel supplies.

Organizations that are located in places where power is frequently interrupted will already have an understanding of the risks they face and will (or at least should) have this kind of facility in place. It is common practice to design systems so that more than one UPS and more than one standby generator provide the backup power, based on load sharing and with sufficient overall capacity to allow one or more units to be out of service—either for operational maintenance reasons or because of failures.

In May 2017, British Airways (BA) suffered a massive IT system failure for just this reason.2 It was reported that an employee accidently shut down the UPS system, and that a subsequent reboot of the IT systems failed to restart properly. The consequential problems of delayed flights lasted for several days, and in all, at least 75,000 passengers were affected at a cost to BA of more than £100 million.

A similar failure—this time at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport (the world’s busiest), left passengers trapped in lightless terminals with no facilities and no flights.3 Fortunately, the problem was resolved by the following day, but the timing—just prior to Christmas 2017—caused massive disruption to travelers both leaving and arriving there.

Physical security of key sites is vital, and it is not simply a question of putting up sufficient barriers to keep the bad guys out, but also segregating areas within premises, so that only staff who have reason to be in a sensitive area can gain access by using doors operated by some form of electronic access control and identity verification system. The ability to detect intruders is also highly recommended, and various forms of infrared and closed-circuit television systems are purpose-designed to provide this.

One of the most worrying threats is that of fire in key buildings, and organizations should always implement appropriate fire detection and prevention measures, so that the first instance of smoke will trigger an alert, which if verified by a second detection will trigger the release of an inert gas such as Inergen or Argonite, which will reduce

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.