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Contingency and disaster-recovery planning make up a significant part of business continuity. The plans that you formulate for dealing with disasters are known as schemes and scheming is a key part of maintaining the infrastructure of a secure network. Utilities, high-availability environments, and disaster recovery are all parts of business continuity. In the following sections, we’ll look at them and examine the roles that they play.

Utilities

Basic utilities such as electricity, water, and natural gas are key aspects of business continuity. In the vast majority of cases, electricity and water are restored—at least on an emergency basis—fairly rapidly. The damage created by blizzards, tornadoes, and other natural disasters is managed and repaired by utility companies and government agencies. Other disasters, such as a major earthquake or hurricane, can overwhelm these agencies, and services may be interrupted for quite a while. When these types of events occur, critical infrastructure may be unavailable for days, weeks, or even months.

Real World Scenario

The Importance of Utilities

When the earthquake of 1989 occurred in San Francisco, California, portions of the city were without electricity, natural gas, and water for several months. Entire buildings were left unoccupied, not because of the earthquake, but because the infrastructure was badly damaged. This damage prevented many businesses whose information systems departments were located in those buildings from returning to operation for several weeks. Most of the larger organizations were able to shift the processing loads to other companies or divisions.

When you evaluate your business’s sustainability, realize that disasters do indeed happen. If possible, build infrastructures that don’t have single points of failure or connection. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (WTC), several ISPs and other companies became nonfunctional because the WTC housed centralized communications systems and computer departments.

Consider the impact of weather on your contingency plans. What if you needed to relocate your facility to another region of the country? How would you get personnel there? What personnel would be relocated? How would they be housed and fed during the time of the crisis? You should consider these possibilities in advance. Although the likelihood that a crippling disaster will occur is relatively small, you still need to evaluate the risk.

The year 2005 was the year of the natural disaster. Starting with the tsunami that hit parts of Asia a few days before the start of the year and continuing through Hurricane Katrina that hit Louisiana and other parts of the South, it seemed as if there was a nonstop juggernaut of adversity underfoot. Many a business will never be able to recover from those catastrophes, while many paused for a short period of time, then were back up and running again.

As an administrator, you should always be aware of problems that can occur and have an idea of how you’ll approach them. It’s impossible to prepare for every emergency, but you can plan for those that could conceivably happen.

High Availability

High availability refers to the process of keeping services and systems operational during an outage. In short, the goal is to provide all services to all users, where they need them and when they need them. With high availability, the goal is to have key services available 99.999 percent of the time (also known as five nines availability).

Real World Scenario

Formulating Business Continuity Plans

As a security administrator, you’ll need to think through a way to maintain business continuity should a crisis occur. Imagine your company is in each of the following three scenarios:

Scenario 1 Your company is in the business of monitoring criminal offenders who are under electronic house arrest nationwide. Every offender wears an anklet that wirelessly communicates with