Ensure network resilience in a network disaster recovery plan

 

A network disaster recovery plan doesn't always mean network resilience. Learn how factors like funding, identifying potential risks and constant updates make a difference.

The notion of resilience has grown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many organizations to reinvent how they worked due to employees getting sick from the virus and working remotely.

In the case of networking, network availability is an important business asset. Loss of internet access, loss of wireless communications and loss of the ability to connect with other employees, offices and customers are among the worst-case networking scenarios organizations currently face.

A truly resilient network can adapt to an outage, whether it involves transmission channels, switching systems or both. It then returns to "networking as usual" or to a performance level as close to the network's pre-incident status as possible.

Risks, threats and vulnerabilities to network integrity

Figure 1 shows a typical network infrastructure and its many risk points or potential points of failure. One immediate risk factor teams should investigate is where network resources are located -- e.g., in a secure building, buried underground, or aboveground on telephone poles or metal towers.

A variety of events can disable or damage each of the items highlighted in Figure 1. How teams deploy those resources can make a difference when a severely disruptive event occurs. This means it's essential for teams to identify all possible risk points along likely transmission routes when developing a network DR plan.

Typical risks and threats to network integrity include the following:

• severe weather;
• lightning strikes, flooding, mudslides and earthquakes;
• loss of power or equipment failure;
• software failure;
• human error;
• sabotage or cybersecurity breaches;
• loss of network perimeter security;
• environmental disruptions -- e.g., excessive heat, loss of air conditioning or humidity not in acceptable limits; and
• construction -- e.g., digging up buried cables or damage to internal building wiring during construction.

Building a network DR plan to achieve resilience

Before building a network plan to achieve resilience, network teams should first determine what constitutes resilience to their company. This process factors in how the firm operates and uses networks, employee dependence on networks and how senior management views resilience.

It can be expensive to achieve a truly resilient network infrastructure -- one that identifies all possible failure points and has enough redundancy to recover quickly. Figure 2 depicts a hub-and-spoke network, or star topology, that limits connectivity to phones and business systems to a single communications link. This is how many networks were configured before the advent of the internet.

The cost to configure such a network, especially when using direct point-to-point channels, can be expensive. The internet also uses this configuration, which is one reason why the topology has become a popular tool for building secure network infrastructures. The choice of network topology is an important factor to consider when building a network DR plan.

As such, building a network DR plan that facilitates resilience assumes the network infrastructure itself is as resilient as possible, considering the costs and options available.

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