Business continuity planning and data backup approaches for power utilities

¶ … Leadership at Local Power Company

Business Continuity Plan, Data Backup Approaches

The purpose of this memorandum is to highlight and outline the important procedures of a business continuity plan (BCP). Specifically, this report examines one aspect of a BCP: the recovery of sensitive information. This report is designed for large power and industrial companies that have a wide and extended influence on communities of people. This is a large scale approach to a large scale problem.

After discussing the background information on this topic, this report will introduce three different plan options to combat the problem at hand. These three options will include details on how to manage different types of threats and under varying environmental circumstances. This plan is not meant to be comprehensive, instead this piece of the solution is precisely aimed to help address the specific problem.

Problem Background

For companies operating in the utility and energy industries, not having a comprehensive business continuity plan isn't an option. Governed by strict regulations and standards, and the requirement to provide continual service to the millions of customers that depend on them, utility companies face stringent and continuously evolving business continuity challenges.

The events of 9/11, along with the flurry of computer viruses and other cyber attacks, have certainly forced organizations to take notice and focus more on business continuity and on protecting their data and intellectual property. Not surprisingly, this has translated into increased spending on business continuity, which has been one of the few bright spots in information technology spending since 9/11.

Option 1

Data backup can be performed in many different ways. One such way is to use a simple external hard drive that can physically store data. These options are cheap as one terabyte of storage will cost less than $100. This option is good, but requires constant maintenance and will not withstand damage from fires or flooding.

Option 3

If a server is being used in this business to run email, databases or business applications, backing it up is a must. In order to do this, installing and using backup software that saves data to disks or tape is the first step. Another option often favored by small businesses that don't have ready access to it support services is a cloud-based solution. Data is simply uploaded via the web and the cloud provider takes care of it maintenance. The downside is that data transfer can be slow even with a broadband connection. Security may also become an issue as clouds may be hacked just as easily as a local storage device.

Conclusions

Thank you for your attention and we will await further guidance once your decision is made.

For any further information, please feel free to contact me with your questions or concerns. I am looking forward to your response and how I may best be assistance to you.

Respectfully,

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