1. Now that the fire took place and destroyed part of the DFU data center in their headquarter office, what other options are available to DFU that you would recommend? 2. What would you have recommended to DFU to ensure a secure future with respect to their IT assets?
DFU’s CEO Carlyle sent a memo to DFU Security Vice President Shirley Dawson and Information Technology (IT) Vice President Mary Benning to address the firm’s security issues when the onslaught of daily news on hacking attempts on many firms using more and more effective methods. Carlyle heard about the use of cold sites versus hot sites and would like the staffs of Dawson and Benning to collaborate on which of these two options would be best for DFU.
The Security and IT staffs (i.e., these are two separate offices and staffs at DFU) met a number of times and decided that the two companies they would consider, after reviewing all possible service providers of cold and hot sites within a certain geographic area, to be the two competing firms: 1) Centrilogic, and 2) OngoingOperations. Both firms are well known in the industry and have excellent reputations. Their pricing schemes for both cold and hot backup sites are not so dissimilar, but the services prices are so high that signing up for a long-term contract with either firm would cause a serious dent on the budgets of both the Security and IT units. This is a budgetary disruption that either staff did not welcome as they had so much planned for the future that would require financial support. The collaborating Security and IT team members also disagreed heavily over their perceptions of the quality of the security staff experts in both firms.
Their disagreements went on for three months and no final decision was reached, and then, on February 2020, a security event took place --- their data center in their headquarter office in Portland, Oregon caught fire because of overheating database rack servers and the electrical system blew up as the software managing the electrical system malfunctioned. The data center building was not entirely demolished from the fire, but about one-third of the database rack servers were destroyed. These servers housed BOTH original and backup mastercopies of certain customer, order, product, and marketing files critical to DFU. This was considered a disaster by many in DFU because the lack of data halted some of their transaction processing systems from running. The delay in decision making by the joint Security and IT team also added great stresses to an already serious situation.
1. Now that the fire took place and destroyed part of the DFU data center in their headquarter office, what other options are available to DFU that you would recommend?
2. What would you have recommended to DFU to ensure a secure future with respect to their IT assets?
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