Hello,

I need two responses of at least 150 words each for the below students discussions for this week. Also in the bold below are the questions the students at answering.

Questions:

Research some of the network and server outage problems experienced during past disasters, such as the 9/11 attacks or a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy.

• Identify the problems that were experienced.
• What steps can be taken by the system administrators to have redundancy for the domain controllers so if one goes down during the disaster, others will be available.

Student one:

Hello class! This week we’re discussing network and server problems that people experienced during major disasters, as well as what an administrator can do to mitigate the impact of these problems on their network. I think a great example to use in this case is the chain of disastrous hurricanes that wreaked havoc across the Caribbean and Southeastern United States in 2017, being Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Oracle Dyn says that the network outages experienced in Texas resulting from Harvey peaked on August 26th at over 120, but also says that the repair efforts at that point were quick to bring many back online. These network outages were mostly due to power outages caused by the hurricane. Hurricane Irma, after becoming a Cat 5, caused many network outages in the Caribbean, knocking out two of the three networks in Saint Barthelemy. The impact to other island nations, such as Turks and Caicos and Anguilla, saw fewer outages, though some networks didn’t come back online until much later on September 11th (almost a week). Hurricane Maria had severe impact on Dominica and Puerto Rico, causing a nearly complete Internet outage on the island of Puerto Rico. Dyn monitored this information by viewing the number of DNS queries occurring in these areas (Belson, 2017).

As administrators, maintaining and updating a disaster recovery plan is crucial to ensuring that our networks are not completely destroyed, or that the data used by the network is not completely lost. Solutions for ensuring data redundancy should be secured long before any disaster takes placed, be that in the form of physical storage in another area or as cloud storage. In the event that a natural disaster befalls your network, having redundant ways of providing power is always a good thing, such as with UPS systems and generators. Of course, generators require fuel, so securing a fuel supply chain should be a priority. Regarding data, if the data on a domain controller is backed up to other placed on your network through the use of Active Directory, or services such as Acronis Backup, this will ensure that the data is accessible even if one of the domain controllers goes down for any length of time during a disaster (Fuhrman, 2018).

References

Belson, D. (2017, September 25). Internet Impacts of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Retrieved from https://dyn.com/blog/internet-impacts-of-hurricane…

Fuhrman, M. (2018, May 3). 10 Things to Consider When it Comes to Disaster Recovery. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/201…

-Lance

Student two:

There are two types of disasters, natural such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. Then you have man-made. Whichever one it is, it is unavoidable. This is where a disaster recovery plan comes into play. This plan protects an organization for the effects of significant data lost through security planning. This is especially important since employees use electronic mail and voice over internet protocols. Even transactions such as payment transactions occur. These strategies should be developed with restoring hardware, applications, and data in a given time, or at least prevent loss. This includes networks. Servers, desktops, laptops, wireless devices, data, and connectivity. This should all coincide with a business impact analysis. Which predicts the consequences of disruption of a business function and process (ready.gov).

Large companies who have money can run dual data center which runs in parallel and is synchronized between the two centers. That way there is no downtime since downtime means loss of money. Another less expensive alternative is to have hardware at an alternate facility to run similar applications when needed. This is assuming that data is backed up. Then you have vendors who can provide data centers and can even provide the equipment as well for a price of course. The best plan an IT can have is making sure the data is backed up regularly to prevent minimum loss and be within the duration of time of the recovery time objective. This can avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity (techadvisory.org). then you have a recovery point objective, which focuses on a company’s fault tolerance. difference between these two metrics is their purpose. The RTO is usually large scale and looks at your whole business and systems involved. RPO focuses just on data and your company’s overall resilience to the loss of it (techadvisory.org).

-Luis

IT Disaster Recovery Plan. Retrieved from https://www.ready.gov/business/implementation/IT

The difference between RTO and RPO. Retrieved from http://www.techadvisory.org/2014/07/the-difference…