4 responses 03/19

Actual work where 2 students given their post on this:

Work #1:

Describe in 500 words the disaster recovery plan and who is responsible at your place of employment. Consider the critical business functions and your recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives.

Use at least three sources. Use the 

Research Databases available from the Danforth Library

, not Google.   Include at least 3 quotes from your sources enclosed in quotation marks and cited in-line by reference to your reference list.  Example: “words you copied” (citation) These quotes should be one full sentence not altered or paraphrased. Cite your sources using APA format. Use the quotes in your paragaphs.

Write in essay format not in bulleted, numbered or other list format. 

Reply to two classmates’ posting in a paragraph of at least five sentences by asking questions, reflecting on your own experience, challenging assumptions, pointing out something new you learned, offering suggestions. These peer responses are not ‘attaboys’.  

It is important that you use your own words, that you cite your sources, that you comply with the instructions regarding length of your post and that you reply to two classmates in a substantive way (not ‘nice post’ or the like).  Your goal is to help your colleagues write better. Do not use spinbot or other word replacement software. Proof read your work or have it edited. Find something interesting and/or relevant to your work to write about.  

Work #2:

Discussion Board – Regulated Monopoly

Research an organization or brand that you feel is a monopoly. Discuss the organization or brand giving your classmates a few details about why you feel it is a monopoly and determine if the monopoly is a regulated natural monopoly and why?

Please find the attachments.

Raja Work:

The Disaster Recovery Plan is part of the contingency plans that organizations create to prepare for adverse events that could affect the productivity or daily operations of the workplace. To create a disaster recovery plan, an organization must understand the use of the plan, the creation process, and the types of possible adverse events. “Disaster Recovery planning is a topic receiving increasing attention in recent issues of computer–related publications. The growing numbers of organizations are becoming aware of the need for such planning but admit they have taken little action because of that awareness” (Maitra, Shanker, & Mudholkar, 2011).

 

           The necessity for a disaster recovery plan is currently making its way into the consciousness of computing facilities at educational institutions. The developers of a disaster recovery plan in an academic setting, however, are faced with obstacles above and beyond those confronting developers in a more business–oriented setting. Most of the literature on the topic is not directed at an academic environment and thus the concepts are hard to transfer. In contrast to businesses, which often run a limited number of applications and have a limited set of users, academic computing centers are generally service organizations serving thousands of users, each running different applications.

            Contingency planning is an “overall process of preparing for unexpected adverse events.” “The goal of contingency plans is to restore businesses back to their normal operations after a disaster has occurred. Contingency plans can be broken down into four components: business impact analysis, incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity” (Rohde & Haskett, 1990). Of the four components, disaster recovery should be considered one of the most important parts of the contingency plans to an organization.

            In the financial organization, I am working for, the infrastructure team handled the disaster recovery and plan the disaster recovery events which helps us to recover immediately. The Disaster Recovery Planning must also include considerations for the physical property of the organization. Information is an important piece to the core of the organization, but the physical property is the home for the information to reside and be used in. failure to keep the physical assets secured or backed up will slowly, but surely, ruin the organization.

            On a different note, DRP’s are usually reactive; they are not enabled unless an adverse event proved to be too much for the incident response plan to handle. As a result of the reactive role of disaster recovery, proper preparation and creation of the plans must be considered by the organization. If the disaster requires computing to be done at the alternate site, it is likely that circumstances will not allow everyone to use this facility. A DRP must be specific to the environment that the place of operations is located. Furthermore, the environment that organizations must be aware of is not just their physical location, but also, they must account for their online presence. The allocation of resources for disaster recovery will always be a touchy subject for organizations.

            “Different software and leading virtualization industry companies have combined efforts to offer some of the most advanced disaster recovery and application availability solutions while reducing the cost and complexity of the IT infrastructure” (Vuong, 2015). Businesses can have complete confidence in the unparalleled data protection, availability, and recoverability of these joint solutions provide while simplifying overall IT management. Finally, disaster recovery will continue to evolve with the banking industry. As banks become more sophisticated technology users, disaster recovery solutions will follow.

References

:

Maitra, S., Shanker, M., & Mudholkar, P. K. (2011). Disaster recovery planning with virtualization technologies in the banking industry. Proceedings of the International Conference & Workshop on Emerging Trends in Technology – ICWET ’11. doi:10.1145/1980022.1980089

Rohde, R., & Haskett, J. (1990). Disaster recovery planning for academic computing centers. Communications of the ACM, 33(6), 652-657. doi:10.1145/78973.78975

Vuong, J. (2015). Disaster recovery planning. Proceedings of the 2015 Information Security Curriculum Development Conference. doi:10.1145/2885990.2886006

Ram Work:

Digital data has begun to be very valuable in the past few years to support decision-making and uplift a given organization or company’s daily operations. “It is important that businesses have a valid strategy to recover their data in the events of fire, hurricanes, other natural disasters, sabotage, or security incidents” (DRI, 2017). In my view, a disaster recovery plan is required in all aspects of human life when a natural disaster occurs and when technical or biological attacks occur. This plan will help governments and companies mobilize and support the disaster and bring back a normal life. So, “these types of disaster recovery plans will eventually come into the bigger picture to start or resume daily functionalities of any company and avoid a huge number of losses and allow the company to manage and run all types of critical tasks and help in maintaining the revenue without affecting their business and their support system functionalities” (Shaw, 2018). The example of disasters is earthquakes, hurricanes, and natural floods or fire incidents. For continuity of company critical business operations, the companies will prepare the plan for handling disasters is the disaster recovery plan. Using this disaster recovery plan, identify the company’s critical operations, continue its business operations, and reduce the disaster’s impact on company activities. Every company needs to develop a disaster recovery planned document for the handling of natural disaster incidents.

            The disaster recovery planned document includes a list of elements like communication details. Communication is a breakdown with disasters. But the continuity of operations required proper communication between the company and company stakeholders. So the proper communication plan will need to mention in the disaster recovery plan. Another is the inventory or equipment management element. In disasters, for continuity of company business operations need to maintain the required hardware and software equipment.

The IT applications monitor can have a varying level of influence and responsibility depending on your recovery plans and the severity of the disruption. At a minimum, the IT applications monitor should know exactly which application tasks need to be executed based on the restoration plan, including data consistency, application integrations, and configuration. By using risk management, we can manage the possible risks and try to resolve the risks. To prepare an efficient disaster recovery plan, one needs to identify each team member’s roles and duties. All the organization members’ roles and responsibilities need to clarify disaster recovery plans and avoid miscommunication or confusion issues. Every team member must understand the disaster recovery plan document and identifies the specific responsibilities. “Using disaster recovery plan document and manage the company operations and the emergency response team or incident response team need to identify the emerging functionalities and perform that functionality” (Entech, 2018). In addition to all of these, we also need to identify the important emerging activities and perform the activities. The incident response team should support the handling of disasters, sends the response to all company stakeholders, and avoids communication issues. All these are details about the disaster recovery plan. Without this disaster recovery plan, they cannot handle the disasters in companies and cannot continue their critical business activities. So that “every company essential to develop an efficient disaster recovery plan and avoid disaster problems in companies and try to decrease the impact of disasters in companies” (Schiff, 2016).

 
References

Entech. (2018). 7 Key Elements of a Business Disaster Recovery Plan . Available at:https://entechus.com/7-key-elements-of-a-business-disaster-recovery-plan/.

Schiff. J (2016). 8 ingredients of an effective disaster recovery plan. Available at:https://www.cio.com/article/3090892/8-ingredients-of-an-effective-disaster-recovery-plan.html.

Keith Shaw (Jan 23, 2018). What is disaster recovery planning? How to ensure business continuity. Retrieved from https://www.networkworld.com/article/3411457/what-is-disaster-recovery-how-to-ensure-business-continuity.html

“What is Business Continuity Management”, DRI International, 2017.

 

Chandini Work:

Thinking of monopolistic companies and brands, I select Microsoft, a technology company based in the US. It is the largest software company globally, with a few hardware and cloud services known. It is recognized mostly in Office’s titles (most productivity suite) and Windows (most popular desktop OS globally). The company provides Windows, Office, Outlook, Visio, Halo, Skype, and visual studio software, Xbox, Surface, HoloLens, and input devices hardware, and Bing, Azure, OneDrive, and Outlook.com services. In Redmond, Washington, the company owns corporate offices and data centres.

I think the company is a monopoly business because they have dominated the whole world providing the services, hardware, and software, more so, the Windows and Office software. The company has dominated the market, making the competitors visible where there is entirety to the people. More and more people come in to use the products and services (Kosyakina and Podlesnaya 2018). The company ranks to pass other operating systems by 90% worldwide market. This company holds an enormous share in the market, leading to the economy of scale on the product development and the marketing compared to smaller companies where they pay more for products more than in Microsoft and sell for higher prices.

The company is a natural monopoly where the company can conquer the market entry and has dominated it has been challenging to overcome. The reasons why the company remains to a natural monopoly are several. First, the company ensures uniformity in the software, making it the most effective software as the users learn fast how to use the software. They understand which other companies try to make their software closely similar to Microsoft’s. Also, the company provides better product options with the lowest prices in the vast economy (Saglam 2016). Software development incurs a low cost of production that has a low variable production cost. And there is more convenience in the production than there is in the smaller companies. Finally, the company has significant market shares in the market for software production. That leaves them the full say in the market and gives them the power to control any output of products and their prices in the market.

A company being natural monopolistic remains to have many advantages in the competition and has no match. Lack of competition makes it difficult to entertain a new entry of a competitor in the market. The company will rule the market through the prices, and the production of a new product with a lower consumption can never make it with the low prices (Altan 2020). The company stands to be competitively above the standards. Making legislation to regulate the market for a monopoly market like this one is difficult because there are no comparing its products and services to others, leading to acceptability, which makes more profits to the company with oppression.

 

References

Altan, Basak. 2020. “Dynamic Durable Goods Monopoly And Market Power”. Games 11 (2): 22. doi:10.3390/g11020022.

Kosyakina, Anastasia, and Alina Podlesnaya. 2018. “Counteraction To Monopolistic Activity In The Field Of Software On The Example Of Cases Against Microsoft”. Scientific Research Of Faculty Of Economics. Electronic Journal 10 (2): 29-52. doi:10.38050/2078-3809-2018-10-2-29-52.

Saglam, Ismail. 2016. “Regulating A Manager-Controlled Natural Monopoly With Unknown Costs”. Managerial And Decision Economics 38 (6): 792-805. doi:10.1002/mde.2817.

Dushyanth Work:

There are two broad classifications of monopoly, Legal monopoly, and regulated natural monopoly (Stocchi et al., 2017). A natural monopoly emerges due to the high cost of setting up a parallel organization or a certain organization enjoying high Economies of scale. The two factors act as entry barriers for any potential competitors. Unlike Natural monopoly, the law protects legal monopolies. AT&T Corp gives a classic example of such an organization. In this context, I will use the Facebook Company to argue an instance of monopoly.

Plausibly Facebook has succeeded in being dominant and the world is leading social networking company and its monopoly in offering individual social networking provisions. The organization’s monopoly has seen it generate staggering profits over any other social networking organization (Srinivasan, 2019). Various reasons categorize Facebook as a regulated natural monopoly. First, the company mainly serves as the main or the single specialized social networking provider. Recently Facebook has been acquiring emerging competitors who seem to threaten its monopoly. The accusations are mainly anticompetitive, intending to neutralize any new entrants to control the market prices. Facebook successfully acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, fearing that the mobile messaging app could improve on their game and under more features to outdo them in the market (Srinivasan, 2019).

The acquisition has helped the company to enjoy the economies of scale and control their prices in the social networking arena. For instance, advertisers are left with limited options to select from hence will pay according to the terms offered by the company, which leads us to other traits of a monopoly where firms are able to keep within their profit maximization function. Consumers of individual social networking services are limited within the Facebook parameters; advertisers also cannot enjoy the competition’s benefits in this industry. Additionally, the company’s imposition of anticompetitive measures to the developers neutralizes threats to its monopoly as the single dominant seller.

All these factors range from entry barriers, single seller, economies of scale, profit maximization, and price discrimination, making Facebook a monopoly organization and precisely a regulated natural monopoly (Hawley, 2015). The company enjoys high economies of scale, and any emerging competitors would require huge financing to offset the company’s status. The company’s monopoly outcrops naturally without any legal intervention.

 
References

Hawley, E. W. (2015). The New Deal and the problem of monopoly. Princeton University Press.

Srinivasan, D. (2019). The antitrust case against Facebook: A monopolist’s journey towards pervasive surveillance in spite of consumers’ preference for privacy. Berkeley Bus. LJ, 16, 39.

Stocchi, L., Pare, V., Fuller, R., & Wright, M. (2017). The Natural Monopoly effect in brand image associations. Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ), 25(4), 309-316.