2 cissp ® Official Study Guide Eighth Edition

 Network, Utility, and Infrastructure Failures 
When planners consider the impact that utility outages may have on their organizations, 
they naturally think fi rst about the impact of a power outage. However, keep other utilities 
in mind too. Do any of your critical business systems rely on water, sewers, natural gas, 
or other utilities? Also consider regional infrastructure such as highways, airports, and 
railroads. Any of these systems can suffer failures that might not be related to weather or 
other conditions described in this chapter. Many businesses depend on one or more of these 
infrastructure elements to move people or materials. Their failure can paralyze your business’s 
ability to continue functioning. 
You must also think about your internet connectivity as a utility service. Do you have 
suffi cient redundancy in your connectivity options to survive or recover quickly from a 
disaster? If you have redundant providers, do they have any single points of failure? For 
example, do they both enter your building in a single fi ber conduit that could be severed? 
If there are no alternative fi ber ingress points, can you supplement a fi ber connection with 
wireless connectivity? Do your alternate processing sites have suffi cient network capacity to 
carry the full burden of operations in the event of a disaster? 
If you quickly answered “no” to the question whether you have critical 
business systems that rely on water, sewers, natural gas, or other utilities, 
think again. Do you consider people a critical business system? If a major 
storm knocks out the water supply to your facilities and you need to keep 
those facilities up and running, can you supply your employees with 
enough drinking water to meet their needs? 
What about your fire protection systems? If any of them are water based, 
is there a holding tank system in place that contains ample water to extin-
guish a serious building fire if the public water system is unavailable? Fires 
often cause serious damage in areas ravaged by storms, earthquakes, and 
other disasters that might also interrupt the delivery of water.

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