Project Part 4: Business Continuity Plan and Business Impact Analysis

You will use this scenario for this project: Project Overview

This is a project submission and there will not be any discussion (no replies) required for this week. You also have until Sunday at 6pm to complete the assignment. Have fun. Turn-it in is built into the assignment.

You are required to complete the project and participate in the Capture the flag competition.

Senior management has decided they want a business impact analysis (BIA) that examines the company’s data center and a business continuity plan (BCP). Because of the importance of risk management to the organization, management has allocated all funds for both efforts. Your team has their full support, as well as permission to contact any of them directly for participation or inclusion in the BIA or BCP.

Winter storms on the East Coast have affected the ability of Health Network employees to reach the Arlington offices in a safe and timely manner. However, no BCP plan currently exists to address corporate operations. The Arlington office is the primary location for business units, such as Finance, Legal, and Customer Support. Some of the corporate systems, such as the payroll and accounting applications, are located only in the corporate offices. Each corporate location is able to access the other two, and remote virtual private networks (VPNs) exist between each production data center and the corporate locations.

The corporate systems are not currently being backed up and should be addressed in the new plan. The BCP should also include some details regarding how the BCP will be tested.

For this part of the project:

1. Develop a draft BCP that could recover business operations while efforts are ongoing to restart previous operations. Include the following sections at a minimum. You may add to this. Use the BIA to prioritize recovery operations:
   1. Introduction (Purpose/Scope)
   2. Responsibilities
   3. Notification and activation
   4. BIA
      • 2 Critical business functions (No IT)
      • 2 Critical resources (IT Resources please) for each business function
      • Maximum acceptable outage (MAO) and impact
   5. Recovery Phase
   6. Schedule (include training, testing, and exercises)

2. Provide feedback on the course. What did you like? What can be improved? I appreciate any feedback.

3. Capture the flag. Complete any remaining flags in the CTF exercise and provide a summary of your experience. See more information.