Description
Maersk, headquartered in Denmark, is the world’s largest ocean shipping company accounting for about 20% of global shipments. With ships arriving and leaving ports every hour of the day and night around the world with thousands of massive shipping containers, business continuity is a high priority for Maersk.
The computer infrastructure at Maersk is designed to be resilient in case of natural disasters or outages in individual locations. Maersk has a distributed computer architecture with computer servers all over the world. They also have a replication strategy whereby one server can copy another server.
They thought that would allow them to continue operations if there was a disruption in the computer infrastructure, because if one or more servers were down, other servers could pick up the computing load. The cyberattack on Maersk began when Russia planted a ransomware computer worm in the M.E.Docs software Maersk used to pay taxes in Ukraine. The computer worm that originated on a single server was replicated throughout the Maersk system. This crippled business operations for weeks and had a business impact of $300 million.
Pretend that the president of your SnackMagic was at Davos and learned the details of what it took to recover from the cyberattack on Maersk. The president has asked you to develop a professional presentation for the senior leadership in SnackMagic describing the computing infrastructure considerations for business continuity.
In addition to cybersecurity attacks, disasters can happen:
earthquakes, fires, floods, explosions, hurricanes, tornados, power outages, terrorist attacks, hardware/software failures, network disruptions, sabotage by employees.
Your recommendation should consider any type of disaster on the computing and networking infrastructure. Discuss the pros and cons of centralizing computer servers in one location versus a distributed approach that has computer servers in many locations.
Describe the difference between replication and backup of computing resources. What are the advantages / disadvantages of replication?
What should be backed up (e.g., software, data) and how often, taking into account the costs of backup versus the potential cost of lost business? How would any backup be stored securely to avoid destruction or theft?
Do you recommend network redundancy based on the centralized versus distributed approach to locating computer resources?
Finally, because your business has to weigh costs, benefits, and risks, describe how your recommendations would be applicable to the likelihood of various potential disasters.
This presentation is for the business leadership, so it should not be overly technical. Any technical terminology, if required, should be clearly explained. Use diagrams if that would help to explain your recommendations
