Disaster Recovery, Crisis Response, and Business Continuity

You’re in charge of IT, facilities, or core operations for your organization when a hurricane or a fast-moving wildfire hits. What do you do?

Simple. You follow your business continuity/disaster recovery plan. If you’ve prepared in advance, your operation or your company can continue to conduct business while competitors stumble and fall. Even if your building goes up in smoke, or the power is out for ten days, or cyber warriors cripple your IT systems, you know you will survive.

But only if you have a plan. You don’t have one? Then Disaster Recovery, Crisis Response, and Business Continuity: A Management Desk Reference, which explains the principles of business continuity and disaster recovery in plain English, might be the most important book you’ll read in years.

Business continuity is a necessity for all businesses as emerging regulations, best practices, and customer expectations force organizations to develop and put into place business continuity plans, resilience features, incident-management processes, and recovery strategies. In larger organizations, responsibility for business continuity falls to specialist practitioners dedicated to continuity and the related disciplines of crisis management and IT service continuity. In smaller or less mature organizations, it can fall to almost anyone to prepare contingency plans, ensure that the critical infrastructure and systems are protected, and give the organization the greatest chance to survive events that can–and do–bankrupt businesses.

A practical how-to guide, this book explains exactly what you need to do to set up and run a successful business continuity program. Written by an experienced consultant with 25 years industry experience in disaster recovery and business continuity, it contains tools and techniques to make business continuity, crisis management, and IT service continuity much easier. If you need to prepare plans and test and maintain them, then this book is written for you. You will learn:

• How to complete a business impact assessment.
• How to write plans that are easy to implement in a disaster.
• How to test so that you know your plans will work.
• How to make sure that your suppliers won’t fail you in a disaster.
• How to meet customer, audit, and regulatory expectations.

Disaster Recovery, Crisis Response, and Business Continuity: A Management Desk Reference will provide the tools, techniques, and templates that will make your life easier, give you peace of mind, and turn you into a local hero when disaster strikes.

What you’ll learn

• All the concepts comprising business continuity, IT service continuity, data recovery, and crisis management
• How to set up and run an end-to-end business continuity program for your organization
• How to write business continuity policies and governance documents
• How to test your business continuity plans, system DR, data center DR, and crisis management processes
• How to avoid almost all the common traps that both beginners and experienced practitioners fall into
• How to keep your IT system up and running in the face of disaster

Who this book is for

Business continuity managers and analysts, emergency planners, disaster recovery managers, service continuity managers and analysts, IT project and operations managers, IT availability managers, auditors, facilities managers, heads of IT, risk analysts and managers, site managers, office managers, governance professionals, and C-level managers.

Table of Contents

Part One: Introduction to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Chapter 1. An Overview of Business Continuity Management (BCM)
Chapter 2. Essentials of BCM

Part Two: Plan for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Chapter 3. Get Started on Your Plan: First Things First
Chapter 4. Prepare the Plan
Chapter 5. Write a IT Disaster Recovery Plan
Chapter 6. Write a Business Process Recovery Plan
Chapter 7. Manage Supply Chain Continuity
Chapter 8. Select and Manage Continuity Suppliers
Chapter 9. Educate the Workforce
Chapter 10. Provide Governance and Reporting

Part Three: Test and Maintain Your Continuity and Recovery Plans
Chapter 11. Testing Principles
Chapter 12. IT Testing
Chapter 13. Business Testing
Chapter 14. Crisis Exercises
Chapter 15. Maintain Your Plans, Solutions, and Skills

Part Four: Execute the Plan
Chapter 16. Manage a Disaster
Chapter 17. Return to Normal Operations

Part Five: Appendices
Appendix A – Criticality Levels
Appendix B – Roles and Responsibility Matrix (RACI)
Appendix C – Suggested BCM Timetable
Appendix D – Useful Resources and Contacts
Appendix E – Continuity Assessment Questionnaire
Appendix F – Crisis Management Team Roles and Responsibilities
Appendix G – Call Cascade
Appendix H – Basic BCP Template
Appendix I – Business Impact Analysis Questionnaire
Appendix J – Business Continuity Management Standards
Appendix K – Severity Levels
Appendix L – Mapping Severity Levels to Criticalities