Continuity of Operations

Continuity of Operations: Build Resilience into Your Government Agency

Ensuring that Government Business Keeps Operating—Regardless of the Threat

OBJECTIVE: PLAN AHEAD FOR DISASTERS THAT CAN HAPPEN AT ANY TIME
All organizations are vulnerable to a sudden disaster—whether it’s natural or intentionally inflicted. The communications infrastructure is key to day-to-day operations, knitting together global and national organizations. To ensure that this vital resource remains available even during a crisis, it is essential to assess your system’s strengths and identify potential weaknesses. The system must be designed to sustain operations in the event of a disaster, then return an organization to normal operations quickly.

The U.S. Federal Government recognizes these priorities, and has targeted continuity as an essential component of successful governance, defense, and homelandurity. Its initiatives include Continuity of Operations (COOP), Enduring Constitutional Government (ECG), and Continuity of Government (COG).

According to the Federal Government, the overarching COOP initiative "is an effort to assure that the capability exists to continue essential agency functions across a wide range of potential emergencies.1" An effective COOP plan must help ensure the continuous performance of essential functions during emergencies; protect essential facilities, including records and assets; reduce disruptions to operation; reduce loss of life; and "achieve a timely and orderly recovery from an emergency and resumption of full service."

"The purpose of Enduring Constitutional Government (ECG), Continuity of Government (COG), and Continuity of Operations (COOP) is to ensure survival of a constitutional form of government and the continuity of essential Federal functions."

While the challenge might seem daunting, technologies exist which, when proactively deployed, can effectively prepare an organization for continuity. Take steps now that integrate continuity efforts into your organization’s evolving infrastructure upgrades and maintenance cycles.

These steps include:

• Integrating continuity objectives into your normal network designs and plans
• Evolving critical functions from non-continuous operations to continuous support during each upgrade or maintenance cycle
• Testing your plan, design, and deployment for continuity with each network, security, and telephony upgrade or purchase

MATCHING FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENTS TO KEY CAPABILITIES
Organizations can achieve continuity and resilience by addressing three underlying technology requirements. They should take steps to protect vital information, ensuring availability of the critical information systems, applications, and records that support essential agency functions. Agencies should also implement interoperable communications to maintain critical communications within and between the organizations. And they should develop alternate facilities that allow them to perform functions from various locations, even if their primary facilities are threatened.

Each of these requirements demands basic network capabilities. Cisco Systems® has organized solutions around four layered resilience categories that are supported by end-to-end, integrated security: Network, Application, Communications, Workforce resilience.

• Organizations can satisfy the requirement to protect vital information by applying network and application resilience. They can provide network resilience with high availability networking solutions, optimized network design, and integrated security across the organization. Application resilience technology includes high availability hardware and design, application balancing and failover solutions, and data center mirroring.
• Agencies can achieve interoperable communications through Cisco® communication resilience capabilities. These technologies include IP Communications solutions, distributed call centers and call processing, and crisis management solutions.
• Organizations can support alternate facilities using workforce resilience capabilities. Workforce resilience provides wired and wireless integration of campus and branch environments. And it connects your workforce to critical applications and constituents even if they cannot report to their normal work location.

NETWORK RESILIENCE
Effective continuity must start with a resilient networking foundation. Whether you’re confronting a crisis or simply running day-to-day operations, the availability of the network may be the single most important factor for the overall success of your organization. If a crisis occurs, an infrastructure must be able to sustain and resume critical operations. It must incorporate survivability for disaster site emergency networking, supporting vital tasks like inter-agency communication. Under these demanding conditions, the network must also deliver high throughput and service prioritization. Finally, all of an organization’s internal and external systems must be able to be effective and interoperable across the entire agency or across government departments.

To address these concerns, the network must be based on interoperable standards and composed of reliable, fault-tolerant hardware. Its software should be highly optimized to meet critical demands, and include features such as high-speed integrated load balancing. And to safeguard vital assets, organizations must include advanced, integrated security to support a self-defending network that actively identifies, prevents, and adapts to threats.

Based on years of feedback from its clients, Cisco has identified the most common causes of network outages:

• Application failures, including "bugs" and performance issues-40 percent
• Operator errors-40 percent
• Hardware, OS, environmental factors (including heating and power outages), and disasters-20 percent

Since many of these failures are not strictly technology based, Cisco has assembled an Advanced Services Network Availability Improvement Support (NAIS) team. Once engaged, the NAIS team compares current organizational practices to leading best practices and peer-performance standards. Using this information, NAIS builds a project plan to improve availability by targeting multiple functional areas, including fault, configuration, performance, security, and design. The result is an action plan that helps organizations reach the "five-nines" target metrics, while also identifying opportunities for cost savings and increased productivity.

APPLICATION RESILIENCE
Ensuring that the network is resilient is not the only technology concern for organizations that wish to protect vital information. Agencies must also provide application resilience to protect assets from events such as a lost data center, failed application server, or individual point failures.

To facilitate application resilience, agencies should employ organization-wide, integrated architecture design elements, including distributed data center designs, data center recovery solutions, and remote data replication. Cisco network technology enables data center continuity in four important ways:

• A highly available end-to-end data center infrastructure that maintains vital information regardless of external circumstances. By implementing regular backup plans across a resilient network, the organization sustains network path, device, and end-user availability. With hot-standby data centers and support for the remote replication of data, you can minimize overall downtime and rapidly restore operations in case of emergency. As part of its continuity of operations solution, Cisco offers a comprehensive data center resilience solution. Based on server clustering across metropolitan optical storage area network (SAN) solutions, this distributed computing architecture can support synchronous or asynchronous replication and mirroring of traffic and data among multiple data centers.
• Tape backup and remote asynchronous data replication capabilities that protect assets locally and remotely. In addition to meeting regulatory requirements for the archiving of data, a reliable backup and replication system must protect against data corruption and provide for tape consolidation that allows consistent procedures and service-level agreements (SLAs) for backup. Properly designed, this investment reduces recovery time with replication, and when deployed with IP technology, delivers remote replication for efficient disaster recovery.
• Synchronous disk replication and data center mirroring that, when integrated with a resilient data center and network infrastructure, facilitates rapid recovery of mission-critical information and systems.
• Virtual private networks (VPNs) and site-to-site load balancing that provides continuous, secure end-user access to applications. Through ubiquitous Internet access, these VPNs allow rapid remote-site or remote-user connectivity to backup sites. Cisco load balancing capabilities then automatically redirect users to the most available site. By using mobility technologies, employees can rapidly reconnect to the network from dedicated continuity sites, temporary work locations (for example, hotels or temporary offices), and from home using the Cisco Virtual COOP solution.

COMMUNICATION RESILIENCE
Communication resilience is the third key technology enabler for continuity of operations. It lets organizations maintain critical communications within and between agencies, as well as to critical customers and the public.

A multiservice IP networking environment resides at the heart of communication resilience technology. This flexible, intelligent infrastructure enables organizations to run voice, video, and data applications over a single, manageable environment. It enables them to keep the lines of communication open even after the loss of a central office, a call center, or a PBX/Key system.

An IP communications solution provides call processing resilience, while IP call centers ensure call center redundancy. Advanced quality of service (QoS) technologies enable organizations to prioritize time-sensitive traffic, while advanced network administration tools enable organizations to coordinate, secure, and manage multiple remote sites even in the event of multiple failures.

CISCO CONTINUITY OF OPERATION EXAMPLES SOLUTION COMPONENT: CRISIS MANAGEMENT
Widespread national or global offices, often with disparate systems and applications, are a challenge to keeping daily operations running smoothly. Under emergency conditions, however, these common technological frustrations can block communication completely.

In the event of a crisis, organizations need a powerful coordination system that rapidly unites leaders, managers, and decision makers—regardless of technology disparities. The Cisco MeetingPlace Crisis Management application, combined with partner services, immediately connects response teams to a voice and data collaboration conference where recovery actions can be planned and implemented.

PUT CISCO MEETINGPLACE CRISIS MANAGEMENT TO WORK
In a crisis, your first defense is communications—your critical decision makers must be able to connect, regroup, and exchange information before formulating plans and taking action. Cisco MeetingPlace facilitates rapid communications through a sequence of automated steps:

• Initiates a "dial blast" to contact a pre-defined set of individuals simultaneously
• Automatically dials as many as three numbers per individual
• Leaves recorded messages for meeting attendees
• Limits access to invitees only; locks meetings if desired
• Secures meetings with passwords
• Provides local or remote access
• Uses an open, scalable, standards-based architecture with quadruple redundancy

WORKFORCE RESILIENCE
As robust as it may be, a resilient data center loses most of its practical value if users lose access to it. This is why the next critical step is to extend the continuous operations network to alternate facilities in order to achieve workforce resilience. Cisco workforce resilience solutions enable organizations to support teleworking, dedicated alternate sites, employee mobility programs, and desk sharing.

Cisco Systems' Virtual COOP solution, for example, lets organizations remain fully operational even when employees cannot report to their usual work locations.

Through secure, always-on VPN tunnels connected to broadband networks, the Cisco Business-Ready Teleworker solution links personnel to the department's high-availability network and data centers, while remaining transparent to all IP telephony applications. Although they're working remotely, connected staff retain access to voice, e-mail, and video communications, while management maintains secure, centralized control. The Cisco integrated approach to IP telephony also lets workers use corporate phones-with the same numbers as at the corporate desk-from the remote or home office, for complete transparency to the incoming caller.

ACTION TODAY TRUMPS REACTION TOMORROW
Your organization will be best served by a continuity strategy tailored to its specific requirements. Most strategies should, however, incorporate the following basic elements:

• Resilient, high-availability network structure that can meet your performance and reliability goals
• Multilevel approach that meets the specific recovery requirements of your systems and applications
• Storage networking and metropolitan optical technologies to achieve the highest levels of continuity
• Validated solutions and configurations from your storage systems and management vendors to help ensure ease of deployment and coordinated support
• Optical core technology in your data centers to obtain resilience, virtual storage, and data center mirroring capabilities
• Geographically distributed resources to create fully functional, converged network capabilities through remote connectivity
• Future planning that connects operational response resource with advanced communications applications

An enterprise-wide continuity strategy cannot be deployed overnight. That’s why you should take action now. Commit your organization to a continuity strategy today. Then build resilience into your organization with each upgrade, purchase, and network improvement. With each step, you and your team will be better prepared for the uncertainties that tomorrow may bring.