Reference no: EM133520429

Case Study: The headquarters of SoftPlanning, Inc., a private company with annual earnings over $350 million, is in Springfield. This company provides a package of Cloud services for the management and planning of enterprise resources (ERP) to its more than 4,000 clients. Over the past three and a half years, the company has shown constant growth, increasing its profits and customer portfolio at a global level each quarter. As a consequence of this growth, SoftPlanning has also seen the need to expand its data center department. Both the business owner and the sales people are away from their offices most of the time. This is because they are developing and prospecting new customers, so technological planning has been delegated almost exclusively to data center administrators and technical staff.Recently, SoftPlanning moved its headquarters to some remodeled facilities, outside the city. While remodeling these facilities, designers and architects opted to retain much of the original structure, including the exterior of the building and all the internal wood beams. For their part, the workstations and servers are located in open areas with high ceilings and lamps. This configuration makes the data center more comfortable and accessible for the staff working in the center, providing a teamwork and collaborative environment. Before occupying the new facilities, the state inspectors certified the building as safe and in compliance with building codes and security required by the city. That is, the facilities had fire detectors, fire extinguishers, emergency exits, fire alarms and evacuation maps, among others.

As part of SoftPlanning's internal efforts and practices to provide greater security controls and protection to the databases with information from its clients, the company implemented a procedure to keep a backup copy on tape automatically. This process is done once every weekend, overnight, thus avoiding interruptions in the daily operations of the company. All backup copies are carefully labeled and stored on shelves designated exclusively for this purpose by the center's data processing staff. The staff has a manual with specific instructions for all the steps to perform to restore a database data with these tapes in the event of any system or security incident that affects databases. In the same way, the center has a list with all the telephone numbers of center staff to contact in case of an emergency. Recently, SoftPlanning increased their cyber policy from $50,000 to $125,000.

Last Saturday, the building where the SoftPlanning headquarters was located was completely consumed by a fire, so now the company must contact and inform every one of their customers that all their information was destroyed.

Question 1. Describe the computer security weaknesses present in SoftPlanning Data Center narrative case that made disastrous data loss possible.

Question 2. What are the components that should have been included in the SoftPlanning Data Center disaster recovery plan to ensure the recovery of the equipment within 48 hours?

Question 3. What regulations, norms and standards apply to this company?

Question 4. What other factors, other than those included in the disaster plan itself, should have been included?