Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office
From: Jim Dillon <Jim.Dillon () CUSYS EDU>
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 15:59:50 -0700
To take Steven's thoughts a step further, It is also critically important to have strategic and senior management granting criticality direction as part of a well developed BIA. It is unfortunate that the BIA's that do exist are often sponsored by IT departments and not management. Ask any department, any function what is critical and they'll all have an opinion. In the event of a larger scale interruption however, you cannot afford to sort out the loudest screams - decisions must be made on a criticality and business process basis. In the best imagined approach the BIA would exist whether or not IT was involved, and IT's position would be one relegated to supporting the items identified as "critical" in the BIA. What part does IT play in those processes deemed critical? Instead the BIA efforts are often skewed towards IT supported processes only, and real criticality is masked by the desire to serve all customers, given all customers can find something "critical" in their operation. Reality says that in the worst cases, certain programs, schools, even whole campuses may simply cease to exist as a reaction to the rare event. That is a call that is difficult to make in the middle of a crisis if the consideration has not already occurred. Said more simply, IT should be one of many service functions that designs recovery and continuity plans based on a business oriented (not IT oriented) BIA. Approval, testing, and evaluation must then involve the managers and providers of those services and data items that are critical, based on the BIA. That's the first order of business GIVEN a large scale disastrous event. Certainly recovery capability and plans will exist and should for the more common, lesser impact events, but a proper view of criticality is instructive in right sizing a solution for every event. Even small events can have wide-spread high-impact consequences. In one case I was involved in a small office fire at the opposite end of the office building destroyed all 70+ computing devices as well as telephones, copiers, fax machines and other equipment over a period of 2 to 3 months. The acids in the smoke damaged the gold leads in most of the circuitry of the modern equipment and despite an attempt to clean all these devices at a fairly high cost, every one of them had to be replaced. This is not of the scale of a Katrina event, but the consequences were nearly as severe, just spread out a bit. The root of it all is still that whether you plan for a large scale or smaller scale event, your resources will only be responsibly applied when your objectives and requirements are well defined. Most of us never get that part done well and thus our plans suffer no matter what scale we focus on. It is possible to expend too much energy on recovery of systems that are not that important and critical to the institution, and this happens often because we don't have good criticality direction - rather we try to be good citizens and support it all equally. Criticality is key to either large scale or small scale events. Only a few of us carry the signature authority and granted responsibility for that level of decision making, yet we tend to operate our recovery analysis and plans far below that organizational level. Don't mistake me as saying lower levels of the organization are not involved, or IT shouldn't be active in the process. These groups must be involved, but in league with and in support of strategic decision making, as "disaster" events are rare, highly impacting by definition. Strategic input is far too rare, and in my observation most plans go overboard on less important systems and the most critical do not get the degree of support/testing/assurance they require. Best regards, Jim ***************************************** Jim Dillon, CISA, CISSP IT Audit Manager, CU Internal Audit jim.dillon () cusys edu 303-492-9734 ***************************************** ________________________________ From: Lovaas,Steven R [mailto:Steven.Lovaas () COLOSTATE EDU] Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 11:31 AM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office Good discussions so far on this. A useful approach is to look at continuity planning not from the perspective of individual disasters or occurences, but to analyze which processes/pieces of your organization are critical. So, rather than imagining what would happen if a tornado hit your server room, consider which applications are mission-critical and categorize them in terms of how long they can be down and have business still function. Once you have a grid of criticality and downtime-survivability, then you can plan for outages no matter what causes them. Steve ============================================== Steven Lovaas, MSIA, CISSP Network Security Manager Academic Computing & Network Services Colorado State University 970-297-3707 Steven.Lovaas () ColoState EDU ============================================ ________________________________ From: James Moore [mailto:jhmiso () RIT EDU] Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 10:56 AM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office Brad raises a good issue that is part of the bigger picture of BCP for a university, at least our university. We have a lot of small groups. We are more like a city. Sometimes, key people have no backup. It seems that we live with a lot of aggregate risk coming from the wide range of functions supported. My guess is that most of the time, there has been some conscious or unconscious decision to allow significant impact to segments of business function, as opposed to moderate impact to general business functions (i.e. benefits of specialization are high, all specializations will not be lost simultaneously = most customers happy, most of the time). This of course means that processes and infrastructure must be analyzed carefully for single points of failure. But, musings aside, Brad, thank you for your analysis. I am definitely using it. Thanks, Jim ________________________________ From: Brad Judy [mailto:Brad.Judy () COLORADO EDU] Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 11:49 AM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office I want to toss in a reminder here that while it is important to plan for possible larger scale events, it is also important to plan for the more common small scale events. Too often in IT and higher ed (particularly after Katrina et al), large scale plans are developed and plans for smaller scale common events are not. The reality for most IT security offices (and many groups in general) is that the most likely business continuity scenario is the abrupt loss of a key staff member (via job departure, illness, lottery winnings, etc). Most security offices are small groups and the loss of a single staff member might amount to an immediate 50% loss in capabilities of the group. Naturally, security offices are also at least partially reliant on technology assets, so the loss of assets should be addressed as well. With some good attention on BCP right now, I'd hate to see focus only on the large scale events and have folks fail to document procedures or policy for smaller scale events. I'm putting together a list of basic common scenarios that I think every IT group on our campus should have a plan to address in addition to their large scale event plans. Brad Judy IT Security Office Information Technology Services University of Colorado at Boulder ________________________________ From: James Moore [mailto:jhmiso () RIT EDU] Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 3:44 PM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: [SECURITY] Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office I admit that my own business continuity plans were on my "to do" list for longer than I would like. Does anyone have or know of a template that I can start with for business continuity planning of the Information Security Office. The easy thing is to say that we have to do the same things that we always do, but differently. Risk Assessment - Only a subset of functionality will come back on line. Some will have been reviewed for risk, and others not. There will have to be some dynamic risk assessment. Communications - The natural thing to do is to relax security in the different environment so that as much functionality as possible can be achieved. Users find allies, etc. Communications will need to integrate with Business Continuity communications, but still will have a role to guide people to safe business resumption. Communications to executive leadership is also regular, but concentrates on service restoration. Budgets / Administrative - Need to continue, as resources are available. Strategic - May be for rebuilding. Or may shift to standards enforcement for existing standards. Investigations / Forensics - Needed for when things go wrong, and are noticed This is a high level. And what I wondered is if anyone had a detailed business continuity plan for their office/role. Thanks Jim - - - - Jim Moore, CISSP, IAM Information Security Officer Rochester Institute of Technology 13 Lomb Memorial Drive Rochester, NY 14623-5603 (585) 475-5406 (office) (585) 475-4122 (lab) (585) 475-7950 (fax) "We will have a chance when we are as efficient at communicating information security best practices, as hackers and criminals are at sharing attack information" - Peter Presidio
Current thread:
- Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office James Moore (Jan 09)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office Rodney Petersen (Jan 09)
- Re: Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office Brad Judy (Jan 10)
- Re: Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office James Moore (Jan 10)
- Re: Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office Lovaas,Steven R (Jan 10)
- Re: Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office Brad Judy (Jan 10)
- Re: Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office Jim Dillon (Jan 10)
- Re: Business Continuity Plans for an Information Security Office Lovaas,Steven R (Jan 10)