After September 11, 2001 terror attack on the World trade centre, New York, human contingency planning, physical security, and evolution of technological capabilities have improved. There are probabilities that businesses can continue functioning during and aftermath of a disaster smoothly. Even though the federal government has enforced some guidelines, organizations have generally doubled their disaster recovery efforts. This paper will focus on how attacks affect risk management, the use of social media during emergency notification, issues of geographical locations, and cloud services during recovery.
How attacks Affects Risk Management
Critical infrastructures are the life support system of the daily existence of human being since the communities are sustained by a sophisticated and complex network of infrastructures. Indeed, citizens rely and expect upon running services and institutions for their safety, health and economic well-being and security. With the over-reliance and real-time connectivity of systems, there come threats due to unpredictable terror attacks. The organizations realized the significance of the redundant communication systems to function around damaged or overloaded infrastructure.
Moreover, there was establishing a public safety communication system, an adaptation of new communication technologies and an increase of using media to train employees on emergency procedures. Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has assumed and is obliged to use an estimated $6.4 Trillion through the 2020 fiscal year in connection to the attack (Crawford, 2019). Organizations were hard hit as risk management was redefined in both the private and public sector. Somehow companies have to rethink how to prepare, respond and recover from large-scale disasters.
Use of Social Media and Other Technology Means for Communication during Disaster
Information sharing between communities and safety organizations during emergency and disaster situations is critical. Social media and other collaborative technologies are significant components of emergency response and recovery. Presently social media is used by a wider variety of demographics, with more importantly a portion of citizen’s days replacing time spent with traditional media. Previously local governments have been primarily focusing on distributing a press release to reach out to citizens, but now they are using social media to communicate.
Somehow, during a disaster, rescuers and victims can use social media to communicate in real-time, as recovery efforts are released promptly through social media. Social media has become an urgent emergency and news notification, but citizens expect to receive information by breaking news released online (Civicplus, 2021). The reason behind the effectiveness of social media reaching many people during a disaster is because a substantial portion of the platforms is transmitted on mobile devices
Distance Geographical Locations for Backup Operations
Geographical diversity is an effective disaster recovery term, as it explains an ample distance between primary and secondary backup sites. Geographical diversity is critical during disaster recovery planning as different backup sites should be far aside to reduce the potential impacts of a disaster if it affects both sites. Keeping both primary and secondary back sites relatively close will make things easier as the company can use staff from both sites. Nevertheless, natural disaster such as storm may damage data centres, simultaneously damaging primary and secondary sites.
Recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) may sound the same. Nevertheless, they are diverse metrics in disaster recovery and the continuity of the business (Dobran, 2018). RTO describes the point in future upon which the business infrastructure will be up and functioning again. It establishes a target time for recovery of business and IT after a disaster. On the other hand, RPO denotes the point in time in the past that the company will recover, and it is the amount of tolerable business and IT downtime during a disaster.
Organizations Use of Cloud services as Tools for Recovery Operations
Cloud provides organizations with the possibility of storing their files, accessing and retrieving them from a web-enabled interface. The web services interfaces are simple as they afford organization speed, high availability, security, and scalability since they pay only for cloud storage (IBM, 2020). Among the benefits derived from cloud use is the cost-effectiveness during disaster recovery solutions that deliver swift recovery from a mesh of diverse physical locations. The process comes with lower costs than the traditional disaster recovery with fixed assets, rigid process and higher cost. Cloud-based disaster recovery usually affords organizations three main benefits: reduced complexities, flexibility, and minimize downtime. Seemingly, the organization should plan its optimal needs to balance the degree or level of assurance, cost of incidence, and the cost of countermeasures that mitigate downtime threats.
The Significance of Cloud Services Tools for Recovery Operations within an Organization
Cloud-based recovery and storage solutions allow the organization to backup and restore their critical files when compromised. Due to its flexibility, cloud technology delivers efficient disaster recovery, despite the intensity or workload. Since the data is stored in a secure cloud environment, it is a high availability process. Compared to traditional recovery solutions, cloud-based disaster recovery is simple to set up and manage. The organizations no longer waste many hours transferring backup data from the on-premises servers or tape drives for recovery after a disaster. Cloud services automate the procedure by ensuring error-free and fast data recovery.
References
Civicplus. (2021). The importance of social media in crisis communications. Web.
Crawford, N. (2019). United States budgetary costs and obligations of post-9/11 wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion. Web.
Dobran, B. (2018). RTO vs. RPO: Key differences to build a strong disaster recovery plan. PhoenixNAP Blog. Web.
IBM. (2020). Top 7 most common uses of cloud computing. Web.