Question

You work for a landscaping company named A-Cut-Above, Inc. During the night of 10/9/18, the company’s headquarters burns down. Unfortunately, the company did not complete off-site backups of its database and had no disaster recovery plan in place. As a result, it must build a new database from scratch. Thankfully, one of the managers had printed out a summary of the activity completed during the week of the fire (see next page). You decide to use this information to start creating a database. You also remember some aspects of A-Cut-Above’s process for creating and assigning routes. Each morning, the ERP selects a list of customers that require a mowing on the current day of the week (using the Cust_Day attribute). Then, the computer uses a web service through Google to find the optimal routes for the day, which may include multiple stops. Each route is then assigned to an employee, who picks their equipment (i.e. truck and mower) for the day and notifies the computer of the truck ID and mower ID corresponding with the equipment they selected. Before departing, the employee also inputs the beginning mileage for the truck they selected. When a route is completed, the employee returns their equipment, notes all stops were completed (stored as Comp_Desc), and enters the ending mileage reading for the truck that they used to complete the route. If the employee is unable to finish a route for whatever reason, they return to headquarters and enter a completion description (Comp_Desc) of “Not Complete” for any unfinished stops and “Complete” for finished stops. They may also add notes describing why a route was stopped. At that point, the computer formulates a new route (or routes) that include all unfinished jobs. The new routes are then assigned to employees similar to how they are assigned each morning. Using the information from above and the report on the next page, specify a database in UNF, 1NF, 2NF, and 3NF using the notation taught during Week 4’s lecture. Place repeating groups inside of the following brackets: “{“ and “}”. Place tables inside the following brackets: “[“ and “]”. Do not use character values as part of the primary key. Name tables if there is more than one. Underline the attributes comprising the primary key for each table. Finally, designate foreign keys for 3NF.

Answer 1

Disaster recovery (DR) is an area of security planning that aims to protect an organization from the effects of significant negative events. DR allows an organization to maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions following a disaster.

A disaster can be anything that puts an organization's operations at risk, from a cyberattack to equipment failures to natural disasters. The goal with DR is for a business to continue operating as close to normal as possible. The disaster recovery process includes planning and testing, and may involve a separate physical site for restoring operations.

As businesses have become more reliant on high availability, the tolerance for downtime has decreased.

A disaster can have a devastating effect on a business. Studies have shown that many businesses fail after experiencing a significant data loss, but DR can help.

Recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) are two important measurements in disaster recovery and downtime.

RPO is the maximum age of files that an organization must recover from backup storage for normal operations to resume after a disaster. The recovery point objective determines the minimum frequency of backups. For example, if an organization has an RPO of four hours, the system must back up at least every four hours.

RTO is the maximum amount of time, following a disaster, for an organization to recover files from backup storage and resume normal operations. In other words, the recovery time objective is the maximum amount of downtime an organization can handle. If an organization has an RTO of two hours, it cannot be down for longer than that.

The RPO and RTO help administrators choose optimal disaster recovery strategies, technologies and procedures.

Meeting tighter RTO windows requires positioning secondary data so that it can be accessed faster. Recovery-in-place is one method of restoring data more quickly. This technology moves backup data to a live state on the backup appliance, eliminating the need to move data across a network. It can protect against storage system and server failure. Before using recovery-in-place, an organization needs to consider the performance of the disk backup appliance, the time needed to move data from a backup state to a live state, and failback. Since recovery-in-place can take up to 15 minutes, an organization may need to perform replication if it wants a quicker recovery time.

Preparing for a disaster requires a comprehensive approach that encompasses hardwareand software, networking equipment, power, connectivity and testing that ensures DR is achievable within RTO and RPO targets. While implementing a thorough DR plan isn't a small task, the potential benefits are significant.

A disaster recovery plan provides a structured approach for responding to unplanned incidents that threaten a company's IT infrastructure, including hardware and software, networks, procedures and people.

The plan provides step-by-step disaster recovery strategies for recovering disrupted systems and networks to minimize negative impacts to company operations. A risk assessmentidentifies potential threats to the IT infrastructure; the DR plan outlines how to recover the elements that are most important to the company.