Assignment task: Management Request
Senior management at Health Network has decided they want a business continuity plan (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.
Develop a BCP that could recover business operations while efforts are ongoing to restart previous operations from the above mentioned scenario. You may use or repurpose a BCP template you find online. Include a description of how you would test the plan.
Scenario:
You are an IT security intern working for Health Network, Inc. (Health Network), a fictitious health services organization headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Health Network has over 600 employees throughout the organization and generates $500 million USD in annual revenue. The company has two additional locations in Portland, Oregon and Arlington, Virginia, which support a mix of corporate operations. Each corporate facility is located near a co-location data center, where production systems are located and managed by third-party data center hosting vendors.
Company Products:
Health Network has three main products: HNetExchange, HNetPay, and HNetConnect.
HNetExchange is the primary source of revenue for the company. This service handles secure electronic medical messages that originate from its customers, such as large hospitals, which are then routed to receiving customers such as clinics.
HNetPay is a web portal used by many of the company's HNetExchange customers to support the management of secure payments and billing. The HNetPay web portal, hosted at Health Network production sites, accepts various forms of payments and interacts with credit-card processing organizations.
HNetConnect is an online directory that lists doctors, clinics, and other medical facilities to allow Health Network customers to find the right type of care at the right locations. It contains doctors' personal information, work addresses, medical certifications, and types of services that the doctors and clinics offer. Doctors are given credentials and can update the information in their profile.
Health Network customers, which are the hospitals and clinics, connect to all three of the company's products using HTTPS connections. Doctors and potential patients can make payments and update their profiles using Internet-accessible HTTPS websites.
Information Technology Infrastructure Overview:
Health Network operates in three production data centers that provide high availability across the company's products. The data centers host about 1,000 production servers, and Health Network maintains 650 corporate laptops and company-issued mobile devices for its employees.
Threats Identified
Upon review of the current risk management plan, the following threats were identified:
- Loss of company data due to hardware being removed from production systems
- Loss of company information on lost or stolen company-owned assets, such as mobile devices and laptops
- Loss of customers due to production outages caused by various events, such as natural disasters, change management, unstable software, and so on
- Internet threats due to company products being accessible on the Internet
- Insider threats
- Changes in regulatory landscape that may impact operations