IT Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan

In order to ensure continuity of operations of the Northern Kentucky Independent District Health Department (District) in fulfilling its mission, the following plans and guidelines are established.  Please note that these are not rigid steps to be followed, but rather are plans and guidelines to assist NKY Health staff and management in re-establishing IT functionality in the event of a disruption, whether caused by weather, fire, criminal activity, other natural causes, or any other reason. 

Data is currently stored on a file server at the District office, and also on Google Drive hosted by Google. Backup of all data is done by using Synology servers. Data is backed up to the Synology device and then uploaded using 26bit encryption to offsite / cloud storage. Several important virtualized servers on the VMware environment are also backed up onto the Synology server in order to restore the VMware application if needed. 

Data stored on the "desktops" of individual computers is NOT backed up. Users are encouraged to store important data on network drives which are backed up, or on the Google Drive which is backed up by Google. 

NKY Health contracts with Google for email services and does not maintain its own email servers. Backup services are provided by Google as part of their offering. As long as authorized users are able to access the internet they should be able to access their email account, along with any data stored therein. 

Alta Fiber is contracted to provide the Wide Area Network used by NKY Health. The District operates with the knowledge that, as a public utility, Alta Fiber has a comprehensive continuity of operations plan in place that would provide recovery of our data network as quickly as possible.

Connectivity by the District to the Internet is via a Fortigate firewall which was purchased from and is maintained by Encore Technologies in Norwood, Ohio. 

The local area network at each NKY Health site runs on Fortinet equipment which was purchased from and installed by Encore. The equipment has a limited lifetime warranty with Fortinet which will allow for replacement of equipment in the event of a failure.

The majority of the District servers are virtual servers which are hosted on a cluster of IBM servers with an IBM storage area network attached. VMWare is the hypervisor which manages the cluster. All of the hardware is covered by a maintenance agreement from Service Express with service level agreements in place. If any of this hardware fails, the best option would be to have it repaired and restored, assuming the site is still intact. In the meantime, while waiting for repairs to be completed, any of the virtual servers that were running on the affected hardware can be virtually moved to working hardware and service restored. 

In the event that the building and hardware are destroyed and/or not available for use, alternative servers would need to be purchased, leased, or rented and deployed at an alternative site, preferably at the Boone County Health Center. In an emergency situation, the replacement servers could be another cluster, blade servers, or stand-alone servers, depending on the availability of hardware. The data would be restored from the backup copies previously discussed. 

Please refer to Appendix A for a priority listing of which servers should be restored first. 

NKY Health currently uses FreePBX phone system supported by MTCI at the District Office, with all six sites interconnected by VOIP trunking. All incoming and outgoing calls are routed through the internet connection. The phone system includes voicemail/call menu and faxing capabilities. In lieu of any failures to the phone system in the District Office, there is a backup phone system at the Boone County Health Center that will automatically switch over when it detects the phone system is down. MTCI provides support on all aspects of the phone system should anything fail. 

Priority order for restoring servers is as follows:

Active Directory Server: nky-dc3 or nky-dc4

DHCP and print services: Fortigate (DHCP) nkydosserver (print services)

File storage and backup software: nkynasserver

Accounting server: web-based 

Database servers: nkysqlserver2

nkygisserver

Oral Health records: nkydental

Web filtering: Fortigate

Anti-virus software: Sophos

VMWare servers: nky-ibm-isd

nkyvcenter

nkyvmwkstn