RISK ASSESSMENT
Scenario
You are hired as an IT administrator for a large organization (UTM Cooperation). UTM has two main offices. The cooperate office is in Vancouver, B.C; and the branch office is in Montreal, Quebec. In addition to these main offices, UTM has six other offices in both cities.
At the cooperate office, they currently have ten physical servers. Currently , the servers are running Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012. Five of these servers are approaching the end of their life and had fallen out of warranty . In addition, with the cost and capacity of new server hardware, many of the servers would have been severely underutilized. The servers used to host email, various databases , file services, print services, and a point-of-sales application.
Over the last three years, the cooperation has two power failures that caused the servers to go down at the corporate office. At times data became corrupt as the result of the software patches and configuration changes.
The corporation uses traditional tape technology to back up the servers. A central backup server connects to a tape backup autoloader and a dedicated administrator is responsible for changing the backup tapes and labelling them according to the backup and recovery procedure followed.
Recently, during one of these incidents, files on one of the servers were corrupted .It was later discovered that the backup could only partially restore the data files, but could not restore the server itself.
Incase of a server failure due to the corrupted component, the server and the data will be unavailable until the hardware is fixed. This could take administrators several hours or days depending on the time it takes to receive the part from the retailer and to replace it.
In case of data corruption, the administrators need to perform a full server restore from the tape, this may take several hours from 1 to 5.Therefore, it is critical that the administrators follow strictly the backup and recovery procedures.
UTM corporation has set the following requirements for you to achieve when designing your solution:
- High availability and reliability of all servers and user data with short downtime period of 30 minutes as a result of the following failures:
- Data loss
- Hardware failure
- Power failure
- Malware threats
What to do
Before you should start designing your solution, you must conduct risk analysis to quantify the impact of each risk on the operation of UTM.
Conduct a qualitative risk assessment using the following framework. Your answer must identify all operational risks associated with each problem UTM is facing as a result of its current infrastructure solution.
Risk Assessment [25 marks]
Following are the questions you have to answer :
- Identify and describe at least four operational problems facing UTM as a result of its current infrastructure solution. [4 marks]
- For each identified problem, identify at least one associated risk/threats or vulnerabilities. [4 marks] 3. For each identified risk assess the likelihood of their occurrence . You may use a rating 1-5 to quantify your assessments . [4 marks]
- For each identified risk assess its/their impact on the business. You may use a rating 1-5 to quantify your assessments . [4 marks]
- Calculate the overall risk value for each identified risk (Impact X likelihood of occurrence) to give a measure of overall risk. The risk value must be proportional to the value of loss/damage and to the estimated frequency of the threat (0.25 X 4=1). [4 marks]
- For each measured and quantified risk, proposed a suitable response.[5 marks]
You must present your findings in one or two tables and provide a thorough analysis of risks. Your mark will depend on the adequacy of your analysis.
