Disaster Planning

A Network Demographic
Perspective

By Jeremy Harvey CISSP

 What is a disaster
Jon William Toigo in “Disaster Recovery
Planning – Preparing for the
Unthinkable” defines disaster as:

 “the unplanned interruption of normal

business processes, resulting from the IT
infrastructure components used to support
them..”
 What is a disaster
Because of the dependency on
customized information and services,
alternatives to these functions and data
cannot be implemented readily

A 1978 study by the University of

Minnesota suggested that a business
can survive an outage of 2-6 days
 What is a disaster
Because of the dependency on
customized information and services,
alternatives to these functions and data
cannot be implemented readily

A 1978 study by the University of

Minnesota suggested that a business
can survive an outage of 2-6 days
 Analysing the Risk
Identify threats:

 What threats have you identified in your

networks and catered for?
 Analysing the Risk

Have you thought of:

 Water Damage (eg leaky pipes or floods)

 Fire (heat damage) including arson,
equipment overheating, lightning strikes)
 Analysing the Risk

Have you thought of:

 Power failure (at the premises or at the

power grid)
 Mechanical Hardware failure or software
failure caused by human error, short
circuits, normal parts wear and tear,
building collapse, earthquake
 Analysing the Risk

Have you thought of:

 Accidental or deliberate destruction of

hardware, software or data by hackers,
disgruntled employees, industrial
saboteurs, terrorists, misbehaving
software)
 Analysing the Risk

Have you thought of:

 Other causes including:

 Forced evacuations for environmental hazards
 The probability of a
disaster
The old:

 How many Angels can dance on the head

of a pin argument…or which disaster is
most likely to occur.
 Ontrack Data Management (in Toigos
book) claim that 44% of the jobs they
receive are the result of hardware
malfunctions
 The probability of a
disaster
According to Toigo the American
National Fire Protection Association in
their study 28% of all damage was due
to fire or the fire protection system
 The probability of a
disaster
So how secure is your network, and
what have you actually planned for?