Reviewing the Mitigation Plan

The final step in the implementation phase is to revisit your mitigation plan. By now you may have elimintated some of the items in the plan or found new items to add. You may also have discovered solutions for some of the issues raised. Revisit the plan periodically to keep it up to date and to avoid unwanted surprises.

Here is the plan put together by the Coho Winery team. You’ll notice that they’ve added a resolution column to the original plan.

Risk	Implication	Resolution
The server goes down.	The Web server and streaming media server reside on the same computer. If the server goes down, then the entire site is unavailable until the server is back online. Coho Winery does not have a backup server.	Back up all content regularly. Repair server as quickly as possible to get it back into service.
Customers have an older Player that is incompatible with the latest streaming technology.	The latest Windows Media encoding technology is supported by Windows Media Player 7.1, XP, and 9 Series. Customers running any other version of the Player will have limited success when attempting to view the winery video content.	Consider encoding the content with an earlier version of the Windows Media Video codec, such as Windows Media Video 8.1. Consider telling customers that they must have Windows Media Player 7.1 or later to view the content.
Content that resides on the Web server could potentially be hacked or acquired illegally.	By default, content is stored in % systemdrive%\WMPub\WMRoot. When stored in this location, content is safe from unauthorized access. But if content is stored in the WWWroot directory, a user could acquire the content illegally and save it to the local machine where it could be propagated or replayed indefinitely.	Use the default Windows Media content directory, WMRoot.
Requests saturate the allocated bandwidth.	Clients currently receiving a stream encounter buffering delays or jitters in playback because the server is experiencing a higher volume of requests than it is bandcapable of delivering.	Consider lowering the bit rate of the encoded content. Consider changing the limits on the server by allowing fewer concurrent connections or lowering the total allocated width. Consider increasing the Internet connection from T3 to OC3.

In this chapter we set up all of the components of the streaming media platform including Windows Media Encoder, Windows Media Services, and Windows Media Player. We also embedded the Player in a Web page and added code to ensure that both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator users would be able to view the content.

Now that your platform is in place, encode some test content, stream it from your server, and play it through the embedded Player on your Web site.

In the next chapter, we’ll talk more about testing and stressing the platform in order to simulate real world usage patterns. This testing phase is the final phase before your site goes live.