Disaster recovery procedure

Business has adopted technology in large scale. Every day, these businesses confront disasters of different magnitudes. Therefore, it is fundamental for businesses to have adequately developed, maintain and exercise their contingency plan to avoid the destructive nature of disasters. However, most managers are complacent assuming that the IT infrastructures will always be there. Very few gave for business survival or continuity in case of IT disasters. In recent years, IT disaster planning has become an integral part of IT management. Organizations are hiring experts and developing strategies to ensure continuity of business. Disaster recovery procedures are vital components of information technology infrastructures that every business should integrate with its process. The aim of this essay is to investigate Coca Cola disaster recovery procedure and data recovery plan. In addition, the paper will explore the main security issues in the beverage industries. The first section describes the crisis management, disaster recovery, and data recovery while the consecutive sections describe security concerns in the industry.

Coca-Cola is a beverage multinational company with distribution centers all over the globe. The company has integrated enterprise resource planning in its operations and had numerous information systems. The company has invested in IT to improve the efficiency of its operations, improve customer management, respond to stakeholders’ need and maintain its competitiveness in the industry. Data recovery plan ensures the continuity of business processes in the event that and IT disaster occur. The strategy provides and effective solution to recover vital business processes with the required time. Coca-cola has a comprehensive disaster recovery or business continuity plan. The objectives of the plan are to offer 7/24/365 availability for the core enterprise resource applications. The plan offers fourteen to fourteen guarantees of complete recovery in the case of a catastrophic event. The business continuity plan ensures that technology, processes and procedures that produce the longest return on investment and minimum operating cost to the company. The plan protects against all levels of outage of application availability. It emphasizes the probability of occurrence that would impact the availability of the core applications. Therefore, the plan focuses on resiliency, availability, and scalability principles.

Coca-Cola IT department works with industry experts and vendors to formulate various options for disaster recovery. The guiding principle in the design of the recovery plan is not to allow fear, uncertainty, and doubt to outweigh the logical and factual reasoning. The key technology building block includes:

• Recovery techniques include data recovery, process recovery, fault tolerance and resilience, data backup techniques guard against the loss of data in a file.

A single, modern nine central data centers

A routed SONET underground ring

Dual carrier WAN routers supporting various physical and logical connections to WAN

Dual non-oversubscribed, high-speed ASIC-based aggregating switches

Dual and redundant switch clusters supporting non-revertive fail-over and strategically placed optical taps.

The disaster recovery plan consists of six key components that include critical application assessment, data backup procedures, recovery procedures, implementation, test, and plan maintenance. The crisis management plan ensures the continuation of Coca Cola vital business processes in the event of a crisis. The plan works together with the Business continuity plan. The business continuity plan consists of disaster recovery plans for technology should a disaster strike data processing centers. The second is the business recovery plan that addresses issues surrounding the operation of the business units affected by the disaster. The crisis management plan provides information to the executives for pro-active handling of crisis situations and include procedures for the executives, legal, investor relation, communication, administration, human resources and technology management. It documents the responsibilities, procedures and vital checklists to manage and control the situation after crisis occurrence. The purpose of the crisis management is to prepare the senior personnel to respond effectively to the crisis, manage the crisis effectively and limit the extent or impact of the crisis.

The recovery strategy is part of the disaster recovery plan. Recovery activities are in phases, and the emphasis is to recover the critical applications effectively and efficiently. The first phase involves moving the operations of the company to the disaster recovery backup site. It is the activation procedure for the disaster recovery plan. The activation procedure lasts 24 hours. The second phase involves the restoration of critical applications and vital network connectivity. The aim of this phase is to recover the company’s systems and networks. The third phase involves returning the data processing activities to the usual or primary facilities. The checklist of the recovery efforts includes ensuring all the critical applications are in backup tapes off-site. The objectives of the recovery plan are to limit the extent of business loss by reducing the duration of critical application interruption, and assessing the damage, repairing the damage and activating the repaired computer center. The plan also recovers data and information essential to the operation of the critical operations. The plan also prepares the technology personnel to respond effective to disasters.

Security issues

The manufacturing faces unique security threats. The degree and type of threat may differ among specific industries. However, one of the enormous challenges facing the food and beverage industry is the theft of information about how the company produces its product. Given the identifying competition, theft of information, trade secrets, and patents is likely to increase. The value-added resellers and managed service providers provide great opportunities to assist clients. However, they also expose the company to a host of security concerns. The companies face potential cyber espionage of services and web application attacks. They are target of intellectual property theft, business processes, and technology.

According to Pricewater Coopers (2013), the major sources of security threats in the manufacturing industry are the current employees. The other sources include former employees, competitors, and malicious competitors. Malicious attacks may compromise employees’ record, interfere with personally identifiable information about customers, damage internal records and theft of soft intellectual properties including processes and institutional knowledge.

The emerging trends including "Bring your Device" (BOYD) and the internet of things (IoT) increases potential threats in the industry. Industrial network security remains a major concern for most manufacturers because of the convergence between IT and automation networks. For example, the Stuntext worm attacks the programmable logic controller of manufacturing units allowing the attacker to control the electromechanical processes. The emergence of the Internet of Things presents security threats because most of the company’s end products exists in networks. Therefore, the greatest challenge is to ensure the privacy and security of the products as they move along the network.

conclusion

Most software developers strive to ensure they develop softwares that meet the needs of their clients. However, there is no one software that is free from security concerns. There are three critical paths to corporate security strategy that include the people, technology, and processes. When most organization thinks of cyber security, they consider technologies including firewalls and antivirus programs. However, it is vital not only to install the necessary firewalls and antivirus but also to consider critical systems including backup and recovery. It is essential to prepare for disasters and to ensure critical applications can be restored effectively and timely. It is also important to understand that employees or humans are the greatest security risk in an organization. Therefore, it is basic to ensure the employees have the necessary awareness, training, and authentication procedures. The third aspect of ensuring security and quick disaster recovery is to understand the security of the processes. Processes refer to the policies, and procedures and action plans to minimize the impact of disasters.

References

Cyber security in manufacturing and production.

SAN (2010). Disaster recovery plan strategies and processes.

Metlzer J & Ashton M (2011). Business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

Carolyn Morgan is the author of this paper. A senior editor at Melda Research in affordable custom research papers. if you need a similar paper you can place your order for a custom research paper from urgent research writing help.