A Brief Guide to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Define risk as the effect of uncertainty on objectives, per ISO, and measure it by likelihood and consequence; use examples like phone data and offsite backups.

Identify threats in human, natural, and technical categories, use a threat model to reduce risk via backups and cloud storage, and connect to planning for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Explore what constitutes an incident and how an incident response outlines five steps—identify, contain, eliminate, recovery, and reflection—to support business continuity and when to activate the business continuity plan.

Identify incidents and use a qualitative risk matrix to prioritize extreme risks and guide mitigation for the business continuity plan.

Identify critical functions and non-critical ones, and determine recovery time objective and recovery point objective to guide data backups and system restoration.

Build resiliency by implementing data redundancy, regular backups, and cross-training to prevent single points of failure. Embrace cloud readiness and disaster recovery planning to safeguard continuity against threats and disasters.

Learn to build a proactive business continuity plan from approval, risk assessment, and business impact analysis to testing, versioning, and clear communication, ensuring stakeholders and operations stay resilient during incidents.

Explore downtime, its planned and unplanned forms, their costs, and how a disaster recovery plan minimizes downtime and data loss, guided by the rule of nines.

Explore offsite backups and the three recovery site types—cold, warm, and hot—and how their cost and readiness influence business continuity and disaster recovery.

Explore how to design a disaster recovery plan focused on downtime and recovery speed, leveraging risk assessment, bia, and defined rto/rpo to recover information technology infrastructure with tested procedures.

Explore how a business impact analysis drives the creation of a business continuity plan and a separate disaster recovery plan, detailing RTO, RPO, priorities, contacts, and recovery procedures.

Identify and mitigate single point of failure in your business continuity and disaster recovery plans, such as key personnel, passwords, or internet connectivity.

Learn how to communicate during incidents within a business continuity and disaster recovery framework. Explore risk communication, who to notify, how to notify, and safety priority in emergencies.