Purpose This project provides an opportunity to apply the competencies gained in

Question

Purpose

This project provides an opportunity to apply the competencies gained in the lessons of this course to develop a risk management plan for a fictitious organization to replace its outdated plan.

Learning Objectives and Outcomes

You will gain an overall understanding of risk management, its importance, and critical processes required when developing a formal risk management plan for an organization.

Required Source Information and Tools

Web References: Links to Web references in this document and related materials are subject to change without prior notice. These links were last verified on April 19, 2015.

The following tools and resources that will be needed to complete this project:

Course textbook

Internet access for research

Deliverables

As discussed in this course, risk management is an important process for all organizations. This is particularly true in information systems, which provides critical support for organizational missions. The heart of risk management is a formal risk management plan. The project activities described in this document allow you to fulfill the role of an employee participating in the risk management process in a specific business situation.

The project is structured as follows:

Project Part

Deliverable

Project Part 1

Task 1: Risk Management Plan – Due 2/19

Submission Requirements

All project submissions should follow this format:

Format: Microsoft Word or compatible

Font: Arial, 10-point, double-space

Citation Style: Your school’s preferred style guide

Scenario

You are an information technology (IT) intern working for Health Network, Inc. (Health Network), a fictitious health services organization headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Health Network has over 600 employees throughout the organization and generates $500 million USD in annual revenue. The company has two additional locations in Portland, Oregon and Arlington, Virginia, which support a mix of corporate operations. Each corporate facility is located near a co-location data center, where production systems are located and managed by third-party data center hosting vendors.

Company Products

Health Network has three main products: HNetExchange, HNetPay, and HNetConnect.

HNetExchange is the primary source of revenue for the company. The service handles secure electronic medical messages that originate from its customers, such as large hospitals, which are then routed to receiving customers such as clinics.

HNetPay is a Web portal used by many of the company’s HNetExchange customers to support the management of secure payments and billing. The HNetPay Web portal, hosted at Health Network production sites, accepts various forms of payments and interacts with credit-card processing organizations much like a Web commerce shopping cart.

HNetConnect is an online directory that lists doctors, clinics, and other medical facilities to allow Health Network customers to find the right type of care at the right locations. It contains doctors’ personal information, work addresses, medical certifications, and types of services that the doctors and clinics offer. Doctors are given credentials and are able to update the information in their profile. Health Network customers, which are the hospitals and clinics, connect to all three of the company’s products using HTTPS connections. Doctors and potential patients are able to make payments and update their profiles using Internet-accessible HTTPS Web sites.

NOTE: Any discussion of products not a part of this scenario, such as health insurance products, will result in an automatic 50% reduction in points. Your paper is not a research paper on risk management – it is a risk management plan to a very specific situation and must relate to the scenario, above.

Information Technology Infrastructure Overview

Health Network operates in three production data centers that provide high availability across the company’s products. The data centers host about 1,000 production servers, and Health Network maintains 650 corporate laptops and company-issued mobile devices for its employees.

Threats Identified

Upon review of the current risk management plan, the following threats were identified:

Loss of company data due to hardware being removed from production systems

Loss of company information on lost or stolen company-owned assets, such as mobile devices and laptops

Loss of customers due to production outages caused by various events, such as natural disasters, change management, unstable software, and so on

Internet threats due to company products being accessible on the Internet

Insider threats

Changes in regulatory landscape that may impact operations

Management Request

Senior management at Health Network has determined that the existing risk management plan for the organization is out of date and a new risk management plan must be developed. Because of the importance of risk management to the organization, senior management is committed to and supportive of the project to develop a new plan. You have been assigned to develop this new plan.

Additional threats other than those described previously may be discovered when re-evaluating the current threat landscape during the risk assessment phase.

The budget for this project has not been defined due to senior management’s desire to react to any and all material risks that are identified within the new plan. Given the company’s annual revenue, reasonable expectations can be determined.

Project Part 1

Project Part 1 Task 1: Risk Management Plan

For the first part of the assigned project, you must create an initial draft of the final risk management plan. To do so, you must:

You Risk Management Plan will contain the following sections:

A section titled Introduction discussing the purpose of the plan. You must include details from the scenario, above, describing the environment. 10 points.

A section titled Scope discussing the scope of the plan. 10 points

A section, titled Compliance Laws and Regulations. Using the information in the scenario provided above, discuss regulations and laws with which Health Network must comply. 30 points

A section, titled Roles and Responsibilities, that will discuss the different individuals and departments who will be responsible for risk management within the organization (this was presented in your textbook). 20 points

A section, titled Risk Mitigation Plan, that discusses the threats identified in the scenario and your proposed mitigations, as well as any new threats.30 points.

Write an initial draft of the risk management plan as detailed in the instructions above. Your plan should be made using a standard word processor format compatible with Microsoft Word.

Evaluation Criteria and Rubrics

Did the student demonstrate an understanding of the competencies covered in the course thus far?

Did the student include all important components of a risk management plan in the outline?

Did the student demonstrate good research, reasoning, and decision-making skills in identifying key components and compliance laws and regulations?

Did the student create a professional, well-developed draft with proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation?

Project Part

Deliverable

Project Part 1

Task 1: Risk Management Plan – Due 2/19

Explanation / Answer

ANSWER:

Introduction:

A risk is an event or condition that, if it occurs, could have a positive or negative effect on a project’s objectives. Risk Management is the process of identifying, assessing, responding to, monitoring, and reporting risks. This Risk Management Plan defines how risks associated with the data maintained by various services provided by Health Network, Inc. will be identified, analyzed, and managed.

About Health Network, Inc. :

Health Network, Inc. is a reputed health services organization in Minnesota having its head quarters at Minneapolis .The organization has an experienced workforce of 600 employees and has an annual revenue of $500 million USD.Besides delivering the health services,the company provides a mix of corporate operations at its branches located in Portland, Oregon and Arlington, Virginia. Each of the facilities of the organisation is adjacent to a co-location data center managed by third party data center hosting vendors having production systems within them.

Products and service portfolio:

The company offers three products :

HNetExchange, HNetPay, and HNetConnect.

HNetExchange has the major share of the company’s income.This service routes the messages related to patients securely between various clinics and hospitals

HNetPay is a Web portal to perform all the payment transactions by the customers of the company to pay their bills in return to the services subscribed.

HNetConnect is an online directory that lists doctors, clinics, and other medical facilities.

Overview of IT Infrastructure at Health Network , Inc.

In order to ensure high availability across the company’s products, Health Network, Inc. operates in three production data centers which host about 1,000 production servers. Along with this, The Health Network employees are provided with 650 laptops and company-issued mobile devices for operations and maintenance.

Scope

Business Objectives

Health Network, Inc. is aimed to provide secure and user friendly services to its customers ensuring high availability all the time and reliability of the data being hosted and security to the information being exchanged through its services.

The deliverables of the company includes secure mail information exchange of the patients between various clinics and hospitals, a web portal accepting secure payments and billing services and maintaining a directory of various hospitals and doctors .

The risks involved in the organization are due to:

Hardware theft

Loss of mobile devices and laptops

Software errors and natural disasters

Internet threats

Insider threats

Changes in regulatory acts and laws

Compliance laws and regulations:

The company is hosting health-care and medical websites so it requires us to be compliant to laws and regulations surrounding secure hosting and exchange of patient information. Especially familiar with HIPAA’s Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information for privacy and HIPAA’s Security Standards for the Protection of Electronic Protected Health Information for security

HIPAA was expanded by the HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) Act in 2009. This established a set of federal standards to ensure the privacy of protected health information (PHI).

Both HIPAA and HITECH acts provide national minimum standards for protecting a person’s protected health information (PHI). Originally, HIPAA was meant to improve health-care processing and to lower costs by standardizing common health-care transactions while keeping the individual’s information safe. HITECH expanded on these security requirements, while the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) manages and enforces these standards.

There are specific security rules within HIPAA that address implementation specifications regarding the encryption of protected health information in transmission (in flight) and in storage (at rest).

Data Encryption

To protect data during electronic transmission, files containing protected health information should be encrypted using technologies such as 256-bit AES algorithms. Additionally, to reduce the risk to PHI even more and to reduce bandwidth usage, any data, including PHI.

High-Level Protection

Data passing to and from the network should be safeguarded with encryption; however, information that comes in contact with administrators or third-party partners might require different control mechanisms.

It’s important to keep a close watch on security policies and processes regarding data and how customers can implement authentication, access consent processes, and audit controls to reduce the risk of compromise. All of these practices are necessary in order to comply with HIPAA’s Security Rule.

This attention to detail allows customers to understand data restriction options to their systems and to carefully monitor their systems for fast alerts and lockdowns in case of threat or attack.

Auditing and Backups

Be sure your servers can run activity log files and audits down to the packet layer on the customers’ virtual servers, just as they would do on standard hardware. Disaster Recovery Requirements

Under HIPAA, covered entities must have a backup plan to protect information in case of an emergency. Retrievable and exact copies of electronic protected health information (PHI) must be available.

HIPAA’s disaster recovery process of protecting an organization’s data and IT infrastructure are typically one of the more expensive requirements to comply with.

Roles and responsibilities

The organization has employed the following personnel for its operations and services:

Data Expert

Ensures the data being entered in the portal is genuine and complies with the national medical standards

Network Administrator

Monitors and manages all the networking infrastructure of the company

Database Administrator

Deals with the data stored in the company database and is responsible for securing the data by backup of the database

Customer relation executives:

Responsible for providing the support by providing the solutions to customer issues like updations or any payment related issues.

HR executives

Responsible for maintaining the company’s employee information, payrolls etc.,

Technical expert

Responsible for troubleshooting any technical issues which may arise in the products

Risk Mitigation Plan

Potential risks identified in previous assesments in the project:

Risk Mitigation approaches

The loss of the company data due to hardware removal in production can be avoided by enforcing a strict surveillance and physical securing of the data devices like hard-disks and it is also suggested to implement a full data encryption of the disks so as to avoid data leakage in case of theft of hardware devices.

To avoid the Loss of company owned mobile assets like phones and laptops, the portable devices have a high factor of risk in terms of being stolen or unauthorised access .It is necessarily a high priority to mitigate the risks involved in such cases .Mostly such risks can be avoided by surrendering of the company owned assets when the employees leave the duties or may be provided only in case of high necessity. The laptops must be password protected and all the disks must be encrypted. Network access rules must be enforced by the administrator to avoid access form external data access points any such unauthorised attempts must be notified to the administrator immediately by a reporting software

The loss of customer data caused by production outages and maintenance activities and other causes such as natural disasters or by the software related errors can be avoided by taking regular backups and enforcing a recovery mechanism at every server so as to ensure the availability of data even after a disaster. If the data cannot be recovered at any case; it must be notified to all the customers specifying the cause of data loss clearly and the company’s attempts which were being implemented for the data recovery (in a worst case)

Internet threats are also a main cause of data risks in the organisation. Since all the services offered by the company relies on the internet the company need to put on efforts to minimise the risk potential of internet threats by enforcing antimalware and firewall mechanisms. Also the company employees are advised to update the software on the laptops regularly as there is a high risk of attacks on the devices with outdated software which may act as entry points for malicious software and spy-ware

Insider threats must also be considered as it may not even have a sign of risk being occurred. Sometimes it may give the competitors to have a chance to misuse the company’s business secrets causing undesirable events. All the employees should be monitored thoroughly and there should be a backup personnel team so as to avoid any risks of employees leaving the company intermittently which may result in the disturbance in the business activities of the company.

Sometimes the changes in regulatory policies may affect the delivery of the services or may cause temporary outages to the services due to updates being made as per the revised regulations. In such cases, the product design may require restructuring so that the updations can be made to the affected modules rather than putting the entire product or service on a complete outage. The higher management officials should be in regular contact with HIPAA and HITECH authorities so that it may be advantageous to predict any changes in the regulatory policies as early possible which gives an enough mean time of response in case of risk.

In addition to this instead of hosting company owned servers , it is advisable to implement the services in cloud computing environment as it will provide high factor of flexibility, security and availability

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