Enterprise Security – Chapter 6

The first section of the chapter talks about business continuity and what precautions are available to help businesses recover as quick as possible from security disasters. It begins with defining Business Continuity which is ‘the ability of an organization to maintain its operations and services in the face of a disruptive event.’ To help avert a potential outage a comprehensive approach is discussed beginning with Redundancy Planning which covers Servers, Storage, Networks, and Power all key components in maintaining a viable system. Another important aspect is the Site. In the event of a major disaster and the facility is not functional alternative measures must be taken. There are three classifications of sites a Hot site, Cold site, and Warm site. The differences in the three sites are functionality with the hot site being as close to normal, only set up off premise and typical up and running in an hour. The cold site is simply an available space needing all components to be operational and the warm site somewhere in the middle. The text then moves into the Disaster Recovery Procedures and the planning process.

In today's fast pace world businesses need to be aware of unauthorized attacks and respond to these incidents. This leads us into the field of computer forensics. Digital evidence can be retrieved from computers which can help the forensic examiner solve these crimes. The chapter goes on to talk about responding to a computer forensics incident and elaborates on the following topics:

• Securing the Crime Scene
• Preserve the Evidence
• Establish the Chain of Custody
• Examine the Evidence

 Another important part is security in a company.  A security policy is a ‘document that outlines the protections that should be enacted to ensure the organization’s assets face minimal risk.’ This leads us to  ethics which encompasses values, morals, and ethics of the corporation.

This chapter was a great help for me in that it provided insight into how a business plans for disasters and protecting its assets. Not only did it talk about external concerns it also addressed internal from the prospective of security policies and ethics.