Chapter 13

This chapter dealt with business continuity. Business continuity is where a business has a plan to contniue operations past a point where they are struck with a disaster, or more specifically, when their computer system is damaged or destroyed in some way.The first part of the chapter gave a definition of business continuity and disaster recovery plans. One way to help shorten downtime in a disaster is to build in redundancy and fault tolerance. Redundancy is where there are multiple servers and other hard/software in a system that can take over in the case of a single device or service being taken out. Fault tolerance is similar, making it possible for a system to sustain several problems before expirencing serious degradation of operations. The book went through several different deviced to do this, from redundant servers (clusters) and storage (RAID arrays) to networks, power data backups and even sites (hot/cold and warm).In order to control potential problems, environmental controls, fire prevention and suppression EMI shielding (faraday cages) and HVAC controls in server rooms (dissipation of ESD). Forensics was covered last, and deals with preservation of evidence after an attack takes place. Essentially, it went over how taking a mirror backup copy of a computer was essential for preserving evidence and how keeping a chain of custody was essential to show there was no tampering with evidence after the fact.