Scenerio
You are an IT security 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. This 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.
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 can 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 can make payments and update their profiles using Internet-accessible HTTPS websites.
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 decided they want a business impact analysis (BIA) that examines the company’s data center and a business continuity plan (BCP). Because of the importance of risk management to the organization, management has allocated all funds for both efforts. Your team has their full support, as well as permission to contact any of them directly for participation or inclusion in the BIA or BCP.
Winter storms on the East Coast have affected the ability of Health Network employees to reach the Arlington offices in a safe and timely manner. However, no BCP plan currently exists to address corporate operations. The Arlington office is the primary location for business units, such as Finance, Legal, and Customer Support. Some of the corporate systems, such as the payroll and accounting applications, are located only in the corporate offices. Each corporate location is able to access the other two, and remote virtual private networks (VPNs) exist between each production data center and the corporate locations.
The corporate systems are not currently being backed up and should be addressed in the new plan. The BCP should also include some details regarding how the BCP will be tested.
Tasks
Research BIAs and BCPs.
Develop a BIA plan for the Health Network that focuses on the data center. The BIA should identify:
Critical business functions
Critical resources
Maximum acceptable outage (MAO) and impact
Recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)
Develop a BCP that could recover business operations while efforts are ongoing to restart previous operations. You may use or repurpose a BCP template you find online. Include a description of how you would test the plan.
Required Source Information and Tools
Internet access
Suggested resources:
NIST RMF: https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2018/03/28/vickie_nist_risk_management_framework_overview-hpc.pdf
NIST risk assessment guidance: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-30r1.pdf
NIST contingency planning guidance: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-34r1.pdf
Business Impact Analysis: https://www.ready.gov/business-impact-analysis
Business Continuity Plan (Ready.gov): https://www.ready.gov/business-continuity-plan
Submission Requirements
Format: Microsoft Word (or compatible)
Font: Arial, size 12, double-space
Citation style: APA 7th Edition
Estimated length: 8–10 pages
Self-Assessment Checklist
I created a BIA that focuses on the data center.
I identified critical business functions; critical resources; and the MAO, RPO, and RTO for the BIA.
I created a BCP for the given scenario that includes a description of how to test the plan.
I created a professional, well-developed report with proper documentation, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
I included citations for all sources used in the report.
I followed the submission guidelines.
