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Contingency Planning

Rebuilding systems and recovering lost data after a major incident requires planning long before disaster strikes. This content covers disaster recovery plans, contingency plans, and business continuity plans — what they are, how they differ, and how they work together to keep an organization operational.

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About this video

Recovering from a serious incident isn't something that can be improvised in the moment. Rebuilding infrastructure from scratch is costly and time-consuming, and some data loss may be permanent — making advance planning not just beneficial but essential. Organizations that invest in structured recovery frameworks before an incident occurs are far better positioned to survive one. A disaster recovery plan is distinct from an incident response plan. Incident response focuses on identifying, containing, and troubleshooting an active incident. Disaster recovery kicks in when the damage is severe enough that systems or data must be fully restored, including executing backup restores or failing over to an alternate site. It is the next step when response alone is not enough. Contingency plans and business continuity plans extend this thinking further. A contingency plan addresses a specific category of disruption — a natural disaster like an earthquake, for example — and outlines how the organization will respond to that particular threat. Business continuity planning brings all contingency plans together under one framework, with a focus that goes beyond IT systems to include workforce readiness and the organization's overall ability to keep operating through and after a major incident. Together, these plans form a layered strategy for organizational resilience.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Disaster Recovery Planning

Aligned to

NIST 800-53
CP-2 Contingency Plan
ISC2 CISSP
1.7 Identify, analyze, assess, prioritize, and implement Business Continuity (BC) requirements
CompTIA Security+
3.4 Explain the importance of resilience and recovery in security architecture
CompTIA CySA+
3.3 Explain the preparation and post-incident activity phases of the incident management life cycle

Key terms

Incident Response
IR
A structured process for identifying, containing, eradicating, and recovering from security incidents.
Disaster Recovery
DR
The process and procedures for recovering IT systems and data following a disruptive event.
Business Continuity Plan
BCP
A documented strategy for maintaining essential business functions during and after a disaster or disruption.
Contingency Plan
A predefined set of procedures activated to address specific operational disruptions, often incorporated within a broader business continuity plan.
Failover
The automatic switching to a redundant system or component when the primary one fails.

Topics

Contingency Planning Business Continuity Disaster Recovery Incident Response Organizational Resilience Cybersecurity

Transcript

Rebuilding our infrastructure from scratch can be painful. Rebuilding certain data could be impossible. There are some things that we can't do after an incident already happens. There are times when an incident is so severe that we're going to have to do full system recoveries and full backup restores, and this could be problematic if you haven't put the proper forethought into planning.

There are several ways that we can set up our organization for success despite unexpected problems that arise. First of all would be the incident response plan. However, we could also set up a disaster recovery plan.

Incident response versus disaster recovery

So what is the difference between an incident response plan and a disaster recovery plan? A disaster recovery plan is the next step. With an incident, we are responding to some sort of incident that happened and trying to troubleshoot and figure things out. But if things are drastic enough where we've lost systems or we've lost data, we may need to do a restore or a full site failover. So what a disaster recovery plan is, is it takes it to the next level so we can recover from that incident.

Contingency and business continuity plans

There also is a contingency plan and a business continuity plan. So what are those? Well, a contingency plan just plans for if there is something that happens, like let's say an earthquake. How are we going to overcome the devastation that comes with an earthquake? So it's a contingency plan: how are we going to approach that. The business continuity plan essentially consists of those contingency plans.

So really there's different aspects when it comes to a contingency plan and business continuity plan. It goes beyond the systems that we manage and talks about how are we going to put our workforce back into place and make sure they're functional. So it's really the overall umbrella of the business and how are we going to continually do business after some sort of issue, after some sort of incident — versus a disaster recovery plan, which is just how do we recover our systems.

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