User-Centric Cyber Disaster Recovery as a Service

Abstract

In a world of interdependent economies and online transactions, a large volume of data hosted on the cyberspace a daily bases. Cyber threats and attacks are steadily increasing. Most time, these threats and attacks are targeted at service providers but service users are greatly affected by the attacks due to their vulnerability level. When disasters knockdown the infrastructures of a single service provider, it will have ripple effects on thousands of innocent service users. Therefore, service users need more than ever to prepare for major crises targeted at their service providers. To cope with this trends, every service user requires an independent business continuity plan (BCP) or disaster recovery plan (DRP) and data backup policy which falls within their cost constraints while achieving the target recovery requirements in terms of recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). The aim of this paper is to develop a model for a user-centric disaster recovery system to enable service users to independently develop their data backup policies that best suits their remote databases, and host same as a cloud service deployable on public cloud for users to subscribe to and be billed on pay-as-you-go billing model. The system developed is highly compatible with MYSQL, MSSQL and Oracle databases. A combination of Dynamic System Development Methodology (DSDM) and Object- Oriented Analysis and Design Methodology (OOADM) were used to design the system while Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) is used to develop the system. The encryption and compression mechanisms of the system were tested with various sizes of backup files ranging from 64 Kb to 20Mb and several performance metrics such as (1) Encryption time; (2) Compression size; (3) CPU clock cycles and battery power are compared and analysed with some well-known encryption and compression algorithms.