Supporting Business Continuity Through IT: Part 1

Act as a consultant hired by a small organization to develop a presentation on supporting business continuity while considering ethics, privacy concerns, and security risks. The organization requested that you base your presentation on a particular case that they have identified. This case is based on a real-world situation where the electronic voting system used by the Public Opinion Programme (POP) at the University of Hong Kong was under serious distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

In this series of case studies (A and B), identify and assessing potential cybersecurity risks and choose risk control strategies for business continuity and disaster recovery.

This case study consists of cases A and B:

• Case A gives the background on POP and PopVote and allows you to explore how to identify and assess potential security risks.
• Case B sets the scene for risk control in information security management. It describes some unexpected situations where management will need to make immediate decisions on what they should do to control the risks.

Prepare 5- to 7-slide presentation (excluding the title slide and reference slide). In addition to the slide content, you should also include text in the speaker notes section of each slide that would serve as the script you would use to deliver this presentation to a group of people. Your speaker notes should include your rationale and assumptions that pertain to your slide. You also need to have a minimum of 3-4 citations and references to support your direction.

Part 1: Identify and Evaluate Cybersecurity Risks

• Rank the vulnerabilities of PopVote, the electronic voting system, in terms of impact (financial or otherwise) to the organization. (In your speaker notes, be sure to provide rationale for your rankings.) (1-2 slides)
• Identify what the Public Opinion Programme (POP) did to mitigate risks before the New Year vote in 2014. (2 slides)
• Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of POP's risk mitigation plan before the New Year vote in 2014. (2 slides)

Note: You may elect to include additional slides as part of an appendix if you have information you might reasonably assume that a CEO or upper management might want. It is not required that you do so.

Part 2: Risk Control Strategies for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Provide Part 2 of your presentation and script. Be sure you are fully addressing the following in 5-7 slides, excluding references. (In addition to the slide content, you should also include text in the speaker notes section of each slide that would serve as the script you would use to deliver this presentation to a group of people. Your speaker notes should include your rationale and assumptions that pertain to your slide. You also need to have a minimum of 3-4 citations and references to support your direction).

• Explain, in general terms, what business continuity planning is and what is the role of IT in business continuity planning and management. (1 slide)
• Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of outsourcing risk control and business continuity management to a cloud service provider. (1-2 slides)
• Identify three risk control options and assess the strengths and weaknesses of each. (2-3 slides)
• Choose the best-fit risk control strategy for ensuring business continuity as well as disaster recovery, data privacy, and ethics. (1 slide)