Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Plan left of bang and ahead of disaster with a practical business continuity and disaster recovery approach, building a BCP, considering ITDR, stakeholders, and cloud implications from SMBs to enterprises.

Establish the people-process-technology foundation for a business continuity program, align governance with information assets and risk assessments, and assign roles via a RACI matrix across internal teams and external stakeholders.

Identify critical business processes and information assets, assess maximum downtime using RTO and RPO, and build a practical recovery plan via interviews and questionnaires to reveal shadow IT.

Learn to create a business impact analysis (BIA) for business continuity, using adaptable templates, department-focused scope, and a practical questionnaire to map critical processes.

Calculate RTO, RPO, and MTD from your backup schedule to map critical systems and cloud infrastructure, ensuring business processes stay resilient during outages.

Identify hazards and assess risks with and without controls, then analyze business impact and prioritize threats to protect data and key business processes through mitigations like backups and cross-training.

Plan for business continuity by detailing contact templates and primary and alternate responders. Establish clear evacuation procedures and align IT disaster recovery with people, facilities, and third-party dependencies.

Explore business continuity and disaster recovery with practical checklists for emergency response and it service continuity. Learn to tailor checklists to your organization, document actions, and support post-incident reviews.

Explore BCP roles and responsibilities, including the business continuity leader, emergency response, service continuity, disaster recovery, CIR, HR, and PR, plus fire drills, training, and communications.

Discover how strategic communications sustain business continuity during disasters, using status reports, templates, time-zone standards, and multi-channel updates for staff, executives, and customers.

Create a customized business continuity plan using a FEMA template, tailored to your organization's needs. Learn risk assessment, priorities, and an immediate action checklist to protect people and operations.

Explore building a BCP (business continuity plan) part 2 by detailing critical business functions from the BIA, defining activation procedures, RTOs, resumption strategies, and alternate sites.

Develop a robust BCP communication plan with early warning and during-event messaging, defining primary, secondary, and tertiary methods (email, website, social media, live broadcasts), authorities, and emergency contacts.

Explore BCP in the cloud by evaluating SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS risks, using the Cloud Security Alliance questionnaire, and verifying DR testing, failover, and audit rights.

Learn how KRIs and KPIs in business continuity and disaster recovery measure risk, assess procedures, and drive action with capacity metrics and tabletop test insights.

Explore itdr planning inputs, including a business continuity plan, risk assessments, and profit and loss, and set recovery time and recovery point objectives, selecting disaster recovery sites, backups, and testing.

Master IT DR testing through tabletop and full tests, including tabletop walkthroughs, functional tests, load tests, failover and failback, and clear success criteria aligned with RTOs and RPOs.

Develop and maintain disaster recovery procedures with clear SOPs and work instructions, enabling rapid updates. Emphasize testing, inventory, and off-site access to align DR with production capacity.

Explore BCP testing via tabletop exercises, focusing on leadership decisions, HR coordination, and crisis communication across data center outages, disasters, pandemics, and large events with media considerations.