BCP and DR

Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

A strategic process of assessing risks to organizational processes and creating plans to minimize the impact of realized risks.

Redundancy

A tactical approach involving the implementation of multiple systems to perform the same task, eliminating single points of failure.

Disaster Recovery (DR)

The technical solution designed to enact specific BCP scenarios in the event of a disaster, with a primary focus on data restoration.

Four Primary Steps of BCP

Project Scope & Planning, Business Impact Analysis, Continuity Planning, and Approval and Implementation.

Business Organization Analysis Purpose

To identify every department and individual with a stake in the BCP process to ensure representatives from every group are selected.

Identifying 'Crown Jewels'

Evaluated through qualitative and quantitative decision-making during a Business Impact Analysis to determine the most critical applications.

RTO vs. MTD Relationship

RTO is time to restore a system; MTD is total time a business can survive without it. Recovery strategy ensures RTO is less than MTD.

Six Key Stages of Incident Response (IR)

Preparation, Detection & Analysis, Containment, Eradication, Recovery, and Lessons Learned.

Importance of Top Executive Approval

Promotes buy-in and cooperation across departments and provides authority to deploy resources for plan implementation.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Redundancy

Ensures no single points of failure, but can become very expensive to maintain multiple systems for the same task.

Hot, Warm, and Cold Failover Scenarios

Hot is running and sharing load; Warm is ready but takes time to activate; Cold is not running and takes days or weeks to bring online.

DR Site Geographical Location Factors

Ensure a single regional event (e.g., hurricane) cannot affect both the main site and the DR site by using different cities, states, or the cloud.

Chaos Engineering

The discipline of experimenting on a distributed system to build confidence in its ability to withstand turbulent production conditions.

Asset Value (AV)

The qualitative or quantitative value assigned to a specific business asset.

Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

A BCP step used to identify priorities, critical applications ('Crown Jewels'), and recovery objectives.

Differential Backup

A data backup strategy that saves all information that has changed since the last full backup.

Failover

The process of switching to a redundant system (Hot, Warm, or Cold) when a primary system fails.

Incremental Backup

A data backup strategy that saves only the information that has changed since the last incremental backup.

Playbook

Detailed, step-by-step instructions generated for specific identified risks to guide incident response.

RAID

Redundant Array of Independent Disks; the use of multiple drives that appear as one to an OS, used for speed and redundancy.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

The maximum age of files that must be recovered from backup storage for operations to resume.

Service-Level Agreement (SLA)

A contract between a service provider and a customer that defines the level of service expected.

UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply)

A device that provides emergency power when the main power source fails.

Resource Prioritization

Ordering the risk list in descending priority and assigning resources until out.

Incident Response (IR)

The process for detecting, analyzing, containing, and recovering from a security threat.

Full Backup Strategy

A data backup method that creates a complete backup every time.

Separation of Duties in DR

Ensuring different people have access to production systems and DR data.

Simian Army (Netflix)

Chaos engineering programs like ChaosMonkey that delete servers, zones, or regions.

Disaster Recovery Drills

Periodic, realistic exercises conducted quarterly, semi-annually, or annually.