Contingency Plan: People, Processes or Technology?

About this interactive

A plan for a disaster such as an earthquake has to deal with every part of the business, not only its computers. The Contingency Planning lesson checks a plan through three lenses. - People: who is responsible for what, who leads if the usual lead cannot, who communicates with staff, customers and partners, and whether enough people will be available. - Processes: the tasks and the documentation, such as written steps, checklists, the order services come back in, and the manual workarounds while systems are down. - Technology: the servers, the facilities, the alternate sites and the supporting equipment. Capacity planning runs through two of them. If most of the team lives near the main office, the same earthquake that damages the building keeps them caring for their homes and families: that is a people problem, eased by spreading the workforce across regions. If the alternate site's machines are less powerful than the main ones, that is a technology problem. Security+ lists capacity planning for people, technology and infrastructure. The video describes the business continuity plan as a shell around the contingency plan. NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1 (section 2.2) draws the line differently: continuity planning applies to the mission or business itself, contingency planning to its information systems, and it notes there are no universally accepted definitions. Nothing in this set depends on how the plans nest: people, processes and technology apply to each of them.

What you'll learn

Sort what a contingency plan has to cover into people, processes or technology, the lens the Contingency Planning lesson uses
Recognize capacity planning in a plan: whether enough people and enough technology will be available after a regional disaster

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

3.4 Explain the importance of resilience and recovery in security architecture.

NIST 800-53

CP-2 Contingency Plan

Key terms

People, Processes, and Technology: The three elements that make up the Cybersecurity Cube's Countermeasures dimension: the human, procedural, and technical elements that must each be evaluated when applying security controls.
Contingency Planning: Contingency Planning is the process of developing strategies and procedures for responding to system disruptions, encompassing backup, alternate processing, and recovery operations.
Location Redundancy: The practice of distributing duplicate systems or services across geographically separate sites to protect against localized failures or disasters.
Replication: The process of copying and continuously synchronizing data from one location to another to ensure availability and fault tolerance in the event of a failure.

Topics

Contingency Planning Business Continuity Interactive Categorize

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