Contingency Management

Since any website is expected to be online all the time and providing its services 24x7, then it is much more critical for government websites to have this required high availability.

• Taking into consideration the political nature in Lebanon, the physical hosting infrastructure geographical location should be carefully considered whereby the possibility of having any physical destruction due to war or instability should be minimized.
• In case the website is altered or down, then a clear website defacement policy must be in place indicating the following:
  • How to set a special page to show instead of having the website unreachable.
  • The main contact person responsible for having this page uploaded on time.
  • Identify the team of people who should get the website recovered and up again as quickly as possible.
  • Identify the security testing measures that should be taken in order to close any loop holes that might have caused the problem.
• In case of any hardware failure, a clear recovery plan and timeline should be set in the SLA with the Hosting Provider in order to make sure the website is recovered immediately or within a reasonable time limit. The acceptable downtime caused by such a scenario should be also evident in the SLA.
• The hosting provider should have a redundant infrastructure that would minimize the probability of having a downtime in case of hardware failure on a specific machine.
• In case of a natural disaster that could affect the physical infrastructure of the Hosting Provider, a clear disaster recovery plan must be defined in the SLA. Having a clear DR policy defined and set in place will allow the website to be recovered from a remote geographical physical location.