Plan contingency

Incidents are inevitable. It is, therefore, important to develop a strategy to detect an incident quickly and respond to it in a timely manner in order to minimize loss and protect your system. An organization must consider contingencies arising from incidents such as fire, flood and so on, and those arising from failure of hardware or software components. Cyber attacks such as ransomware are becoming more common and must also be considered.

An organization should have contingency plans in place to cover the entire range of failures and eventualities. Employees should be trained and be familiar with the contents of the contingency plans.

As part of planning for contingencies, it is important to establish a site, physically separated from the central one, that has replication capability. Doing so will ensure the integrity of an operational system where the central site is at risk from fire, floods or other disasters. The replication capability includes having duplicated hardware, and requires software configuration and key state information to be periodically propagated from the central site to the recovery site. Each recovery scenario is unique, so it is important to consult with system integration experts regarding the design of communications equipment, hardware and the configuration of the software.

Protecting the data stored in your system is also of paramount importance. Full and incremental backups must be scheduled on a regular basis. Backups should be verified by running tests to restore from backed up data. Backups should be stored offline so that they are safe from cyber attacks such as ransomware.

Organizations should also have business continuity and disaster recovery plans that are similar to contingency plans. These plans are covered briefly in the sections to follow.