A SWOT ANALYSIS ON CISCO® HIGH AVAILABILITY VIRTUALIZATION CLUSTERS DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN Eman Al-Harbi Soha S. Zaghloul 431920472@student.ksa.edu.sa smekki@ksu.edu.sa Faculty of Computer and Information Science Department of Computer Science King Saud University Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Abstract Continuity of services availability is critical in some business types such as banks, hospitals, and military institutions. However, this may be interrupted by either a natural disaster such as an earthquake, volcano, or a tornado. In addition, human negative interference such as hackers or terrorism may expose valuable resources to danger. Moreover, disasters may occur because of a network interruption, system crash, or electricity outage. Therefore, a disaster recovery plan is vital to provide the precautions necessary to minimize the negative effects that may occur as a result of a potential disaster. Many companies in the market provided solutions for disaster recovery to resume operations after a failure with the minimum losses. This paper studies the Cisco ® disaster recovery plan, and then performs a SWOT analysis on the provided solution. Keywords Disaster Recovery Plan; Cisco; SWOT analysis; Warm standby; Hot standby; Distributed Data Center; 1. Introduction Cloud computing involves the delivery of services over the Internet to geographically dispersed hosts. Many services are offered through the cloud such as software (SaaS), platform (PaaS) and Infrastructure (IaaS). A data center is the physical location that accommodates the dense arrangements of computer equipment, associate networking, telecommunications, storage and auxiliary equipment required to store, process, manage and disseminate data and information [1]. One of the most useful benefits of cloud computing is the rapid provision of a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective data center. Therefore, the disaster recovery plan (DRP) of a data center should be highly considered for two main reasons. The first reason is that the probability of a system crash is directly proportional to the workload exerted on the resources; this should be under focus especially if the data center belongs to one of the sensitive tenants such as a bank or a hospital. The second reason is that the recovery plan in fact shifts the cost of the secondary facility to the budget of another party. According to [2], “Data Center Disaster Recovery is the organizational planning to resume business operations following an unexpected event which may damage or destroy data, software and hardware systems”. In our life, many types of disasters may be encountered. Some of them are natural disasters such as flood, earthquake, tornadoes, etc… Other disasters may occur because of the interference of criminal human-beings, such as hackers or even terrorists, who intentionally target the loss of resources. In addition, operational disasters may occur; examples are loss of network connections, power failure, data corruption or loss, false redundancy, or cascading systems failure. The danger of such disasters lies in the services interruption rather than the severity of the disaster per se. Imagine that the services of a bank are interrupted for just two seconds: this entails the loss of customers’ money and may cost the bank a ISBN: 978-0-9853483-3-5 ©2013 SDIWC 501