Crisis Resilient Architecture

I gave this presentation at IISyG in 2005 to an audience of Infosec specialists. The talk was inspired by Dr Sally Leivesly of Newrisk Ltd who regularly appears on the BBC after terrorist incidents. She outlined combinatorial threat and area denial scenarios.

Another influence was the amount of fuel required to power centralised data centers which, in times of crisis, may be hard to supply regularly. Then there is the strange notion that staff will have the desire and ability to travel to some remote data center regularly which frankly beggars belief. The whole BCP/DR scenario is, sadly, driven by regulators, auditors and policy wonks.

So my take on the answer is that we need fabric/cloud computing, micro data centers and UWB MAN networks which can be up and running in an instant. Combined with the "crisis desktop", a bootable OS on a memory stick which can form a secure platform to access your virtual desktop. The parts are all there - all we need is the strategists to catch up...