Disaster Recovery Service

Today many organizations adopt new and advance technologies to overcome their IT needs in day-to-day transactions, however this also escalate the possibility of new threats and downtime cost occurred due to the risk of unforeseen events, such as, natural disaster, virus breakdown, denial of service attack or power cut-down that can interrupt the business. Cipher Storm’s disaster recovery planning (DRP) or business continuity planning (BCP) helps these organizations to deal with potential disasters in a holistic approach to cover the essential enterprise resources critical to the business. Our consultants derive and develop detailed business continuity plans by determining business critical functions, prioritized them, setup the communication strategy and help to improve the staff awareness. Separate plans can be developed for each division or department. Disaster recovery and business continuity plan is considered vital to minimize the impact of disaster and recover the organization’s information assets to stable condition. Our approach towards business continuity management (BCM) starts by managing the risks and ensure that an organization can operate at minimum level before the complete recovery take place. This will ensure the consistency between recovery and business continuity process.

Business Impact Assessment (BIA)

Business impact assessment (BIA) is a part of disaster recovery service mainly focused towards information risk assessment. It is used in the beginning of BCP/DRP to understand the information risks specific to the business or project so that the advance preparations can be made. BIA streamline with regular business process to gather enough information about the organization activities (business areas, systems, operations, controls, projects) and draw the complete risk map. Cipher Storm consultant resolve this objective by applying industry standard for the risk management, ISF-IRAM, and set of specific methods and techniques to accomplish the task.

Business Continuity Testing (BCT)

Business continuity plan primarily protects the business from active disruption and provide continued working environment with minimum required resources. However, it is important to evaluate the plan by executing several scenario based tests to assess the organization’s business resilience from every perspective mentioned in the plan. These set of tests can be extended further to validate the system resilience by ensuring the assumptions made in the plan are valid and workable for the business. If necessary, our consultant will advise on specific areas of the plan where more attention and corrective measures are required.

Possible Causes of Disaster

Following are some of the key areas that may cause serious business disruption:

• Flooding
• Earthquake
• Tornados and Hurricanes
• Terrorism and War
• Industrial Sabotage
• Electrical power failure
• Communication breakdown
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Lost of sensitive information
• Environmental hazards

Preventive Measures Through BCP

Business continuity plan always ensure that the organization has up-to-date information that should be effective in emergency situations. According to the industry best practices, this plan should be updated every quarter to reflect any changes in the business process. It is vital to get support from the management in order to create complete disaster recovery strategy and raise the awareness among management and staff members. To keep the business up and running, following key aspects should be addressed at minimum, such as, assets insurance, network and systems backup and recovery strategies (data replication, continuous backup).

One of the important aspects followed in disaster recovery planning (DRP) is the execution of a plan with specific backup strategy (cold, warm or hot).

Cold Backup

• Least expensive process
• An extra space or office to hold company’s operations and restore services to the users.
• Delays are considerable when moving from affected site.

 Warm Backup

• Perfect for mid-size firms
• With all necessary office equipment and computers pre-loaded at recovery site.
• Latest backups should be transferred from off-site to the recovery site in order to restore the operations.
• This would normally take 24 hours.

Hot Backup

• Design for mid-large corporations, though most expensive.
• Synchronously mirroring the current data and configuration at recovery site.
• Can be brought in live production environment within few hours.

Cipher Storm - Disaster Recovery Process

Features

• Backup and recovery strategies for small, mid-size and large corporations.
• Increase security of digital assets in the event of disaster.
• Assess the risks based on network architecture, patch management, physical security and other IT operations.
• Ensure the backup data should reside at secure location.
• Monitor the remote access to data center (i.e. recovery site).
• Employed proper change control management to reflect any updates to DRP.
• Perform regular backups to ensure the integrity.
• Each process is documented in a way that even non-technical person can proceed with disaster recovery process.
• Achieve industry compliance and regulations.

Benefits

• Prevent business disruption.
• Prevent financial loss that may occur during business downtime.
• Save from bad image and market reputation.
• Pro-active controls for backup on customer and regular IT operations.
• Avoid penalties due to service downtime or violation of service level agreements.
• Prevent revenue loss from new service contracts.
• Prevent the loss of sensitive data (accounts information, transactions, and bills).
• Save the additional cost on equipment replacement, administration and travel expenses.
• Save time and cost on data recovery process.
• Prevent legal prosecution for loss of data or non-compliance violations.

Computer Forensics & Investigation (CS-CFI)

Ethical Hacking and Network Defense (CS-EHND)