Background: Maersk, headquartered in Denmark, is the world’s largest ocean shipping company accounting for about 20% of global shipments. With ships arriving and leaving ports every hour of the day and night, loaded with thousands of massive shipping containers, business continuity is a high priority. The computer infrastructure at Maersk is designed to be resilient in case of natural disasters or outages in individual locations. Maersk has a distributed computer architecture with computer servers all over the world. They also have a replication strategy whereby one server can copy another. They thought that would allow them to continue operations because if one or more servers were down, other servers could pick up the computing load. The cyberattack on Maersk began when Russia planted a computer worm in the M.E.Docs software Maersk used to pay taxes in Ukraine. The computer worm that originated on a single server was replicated throughout the Maersk system. This crippled business operations for weeks and had a business impact of $300 million.
The president of Tesla was at Davos and learned what it took to recover from the cyberattack on Maersk. The president suddenly realized that not only a cyberattack, but also a natural disaster, could disrupt business operations and has asked you to develop a professional presentation for the senior leadership describing the computing infrastructure considerations for business continuity. Although some of the company’s information systems infrastructure could be, or has been, replaced with cloud computing, the executive team wants to retain an internal computing and networking infrastructure for certain operations and ensure it can withstand any type of disaster. Natural disasters can include earthquakes, fires, floods, explosions, hurricanes, tornados, power outages, terrorist attacks, hardware/software failures, network disruptions, employee sabotage, and political upheaval. Your recommendations should consider the types of disasters that are most likely to impact the computing and networking infrastructure in the company. This presentation is to senior executives, so explain any technical terms in plain English.
Assignment: This assignment aims to evaluate how different internal information system infrastructures for a company can affect its business continuity.
Describe the locations of the business operations for Tesla, and summarize the potential natural disasters for those locations. Also, identify the locations of your major suppliers and discuss any possible supply chain disruptions.
In terms senior executives can understand, describe the differences between centralized and distributed computing infrastructures, including the pros and cons of each.
Given the need for business continuity in case of a disaster, recommend either a centralized or distributed approach for your company’s internal computing infrastructure. Because the executive team wants to avoid a disruption like the one at Maersk, address why its distributed infrastructure was crippled by a cyberattack.
Recommend a business continuity approach that considers how to protect company data. Describe the advantages and disadvantages of data replication and backup so the business executives clearly understand the options. Determine the types of data in Tesla that should be replicated and/or backed up and how often. Specify how any offline copies of company data would be stored securely to avoid destruction or theft.
The PowerPoint presentation must:
Be between 10 and 20 slides and no longer than 15 minutes
Use, as the minimum, an 18 point font
Contain audio (and optionally video) of you presenting your slides
Have a file size no larger than 19Mb
The Kaltura Capture Desktop Recorder should work fine https://www.wilmu.edu/multimedia/Kaltura.aspxLinks to an external site.
Include references in APA format on the final slide
Be uploaded to Canvas as described here: https://www.wilmu.edu/multimedia/submitting_kaltura_content.aspxLinks to an external site.
