In this case study we have been asked to create a report about disaster recovery and the best practices involved for such an incident. There are many types of disaster recovery systems that can be employed. For our purposes I will talk about two of the currently industry standards. First is the "Cloud-Based" disaster recovery. In this type of recovery, SMPR would be required to lease network storage space from a cloud-based DR vendor and SMPR would set up proprietary backup software that would communicate with the vendors system and remotely and securely store SMPR's backup data and network configurations on the Cloud, or in other words in a server farm of hosted SAN devices. This option is typically a little more cost effective because the vendor has to maintain the hardware for storage, and ensure that it can be accessed within an agreed upon SLA.
The next method of disaster recover we will talk about is called a Co-Location shorted to Co-Lo in the industry. In a Co-location setting, you pay rental space for a building, you then bring in your own hardware and setup and manage your own connections to this location for your data backups and storage. Typically in a Co-Lo, you will need to worry about how much power you will use, how much rack space will be required, and how much bandwidth you will need between the SMPR offices and Co-Lo. A Co-Location typically has many redundant systems to ensure that your servers do not lose power, or data connection, they generally have features in place that will counter act most if not all natural disasters, and have excellent physical security on site to protect unwanted intrusion to your servers. This makes the Co-Lo a prime location to use basic backup software to dump digital backups of your Mission Critical data and servers to a SAN that is guaranteed not to lose connection or power in the event of any type of disaster. This means that you could restore your network to a working state.
Finally, I have been asked to explain briefly what a firewall is and its importance to a network. The origin of the word fire wall comes from the automobile industry where manufacturers would literally install a fire resistant wall between the driver and the engine. This was to protect the operator from being burned while operating a car. The term firewall now a days is more synonymous to a digital barrier between a network and the WWW. A firewall monitors all ports and traffic into and out of a network, it can flag potential behavior and report that to the administrator, or block it all together. Simply put the firewall is the primary barrier between yourself, and the internet. It protects networks by enforcing credentials to be passed in order to gain access to certain ports, or in some cases even certain networking protocols such as FTP or FTPS. A firewall if not THE most crucial part of network security, is definitely in the top end of all network security.