A local hospital asks you to help improve its networks fault tolerance. The hosp

Question

A local hospital asks you to help improve its networks fault tolerance. The hospitals network carries critical patient care data in real time from both a mainframe host and several servers to workstations in operating rooms, doctors offices, the billing office, teaching labs, and remote clinics across the region. Of course, all of the data transferred is highly confidential and must not be lost or accessed by unauthorized personnel. Specifically, the network is configured as follows:

Six hundred workstations are connected to five shared servers that run Solaris. Fifty of these workstations serve as training computers in medical school classrooms. Two hundred workstations sit in doctors offices and are used to view and update patient records, submit accounting information, and so on. Twenty workstations are used in operating rooms to perform imaging and for accessing data in real time. The remaining workstations are used by administrative staff.

The clients are connected in a mostly switched, star-wired bus network using Ethernet 100Base-T technology.

An Internet gateway supports e-mail, online medical searches, and VPN communications with four remote clinics. The Internet connection is a T3link to a local ISP.

A firewall prevents unauthorized access from the T3 connection into the hospitals network.

The hospitals IT director asked you to identify the critical points of failure in her network and to suggest how she might eliminate them. On a sheet of paper, draw a logical diagram of the network and identify the single points of failure, then recommend which points of failure should be addressed to increase availability and how to achieve this goal.

Case Project 2

Unfortunately, the solution you provided for the hospital was rejected by the board of directors because it was too expensive. How would you determine where to cut costs in the proposal? Consider which fault-tolerant options are most critical and also which are expensive but less critical. What questions should you ask the IT director that will better enable you to prioritize the fault-tolerance features youve recommended? What points of failure do you suggest absolutely must be addressed with redundancy?

Case Project 3

Your second proposal, with its reduced cost, was accepted by the board of directors. Now, the hospitals IT director has asked you to help develop a disaster recovery plan. Based on what you have learned about the hospitals topology, usage patterns, and current fault-tolerance measures, outline a disaster recovery plan for the hospital. Your plan should specifically address provisions for data, equipment, and connectivity related to the network. Explain how functionality and data will be restored and what staff should be involved in the post disaster recovery.

Explanation / Answer

What questions should you ask the IT director that will better enable you to prioritize the fault-tolerance
features youve recommended?

Q: What is the landscape? How many systems are totally working for productions?

Q: Which servers having highly secured data? how many number of free servers available for recovery?

Q: What is the network topology and redundancy?

Q: Is there any network team if we got any breakage in network while performing FTP for data transfer?

Q: Are there any regular strategies for testing the disaster recovery plan?

Q: Is there any team for data center ? Can data center pay attention to fault tolerance?

Q: What is the backup strategy weekly, daily, monthly? list all the data and servers are being backuped.
how frequently backups occur? Where backups are located? How can backed data can be recovered.?

Q: Where does Software are located is there any media directory for intalling newly?

Q: What is the software you are using for entire hospital production?

Q: Is there any team like IT team or OS teams to monitoring and maintenance the systems and applications?

Q: What about convergence? Is data center network is converged or not?

Q: How convergence can be customized to ensure the critical files are prioritized,
how to maintain the backup and transfer of the files in a specific location.

Disaster recovery plan :

- keep a checklist of do's and dont's in the scope of the activity.
- Collect entire thopology and network infrastructure documents.
- Identifying the most serious threats and vulnerabilities, and the most critical assets.
- Reviewing the history of unplanned incidents and outages, and how they were handled.
- Collect the disaster strategies and identifying the current DR strategies.
- Get the contacts of IT team, OS team and database teams if available while any emergency needed.
- Get the management review and approval for the disaster recovery plan.
- Before continuing first test the DR plan.
- If any new ideas and implements needed Update the plan accordingly,
- Keep all relevent plans and goals and passwords for doing DR.
- Be aware of which kind of DR recovery we are planning like type of failure
Application failure,host failure, network failure and data center failure.

Your plan should specifically address provisions for data, equipment, and connectivity related to
the network. Explain how functionality and data will be restored and what staff should be
involved in the post disaster recovery.

Best practices and best plan is that DR plans be thoroughly tested and evaluated on a regular basis.

By DR plans documentation and the procedures for testing the plan should be tested before
The tests will provide the organization with the assurance that all necessary steps are needed.
So list of things we should know or collect and tell to the director are :

- list out all the feasibility and compatibility of backup facilities and procedures.
- Identify the critical treats and areas in the plan that need modification.
- Give a brief info and providing training to the team managers and team members.
- Give a demo about the test and show the ability of the organization to recover.
- Always Provide motivation for maintaining and updating the disaster recovery plan.

So when we finish with DR plan and recovery things we need to perform before delivering it like:
- Securing the data by giving Anti-virus and explain the advantages of it.
- Give guidelines for future DR plan.
- Tell the Public enagegement in recovering planning.
- list all the financial recovery.
- Next plan of action and planning of recovery management.
- Give a breif details about recovery
- Tell them about secuirty rules and roles for point of failure.
- Provide the sense of security
- tell how to minize the risk of delays
- Provide the standard testing plan
- Tell them Minimizing decision-making during a disaster
- And Reducing potential legal liabilities

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