SOURCE:

Faculty: Physical Sciences
Department: Computer Science

CONTRIBUTORS:

Karim, U.
Inyiama, H.C.

ABSTRACT:

In a world of interdependent economies and online transactions, a large volume of data is hosted on the cyberspace on daily basis. 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 trend, every service user requires an independent business continuity plan (IBCP) 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 research work is to develop a user-centric cyber disaster recovery mechanism to enable service users to independently develop and implement their independent data backup policies that best suits their remote databases. The system developed is highly compatible with MYSQL, MSSQL and Oracle databases. With this system, service users have the liberty to independently define and implement their private backup plans and disaster recovery policies and also to configure their remote databases by selecting the entities to be backed up and for each entity selected, the backup frequency is also selected. The system creates backup files for the remote databases in accordance with their configuration settings. The backup files are encrypted to prevent its contents from Man in the Middle attacks (MITM). The encrypted backup files are also compressed to enhance its transmission across networks. A combination of Dynamic System Development Methodology (DSDM) and Object-Oriented Analysis and Design Methodology (OOADM) are used to design the system while Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) is used to develop the system. The system is well tested and the results obtained are compared with some well-known systems and outputs are relatively good.