Plan business continuity

Business continuity planning addresses strategies to maintain or re-establish production in the event of any disruption. These disruptions may be caused by a natural disaster (flood, earthquake, etc), by an intentional or unintentional human-made event (arson, operator error, power outage, etc), or by system failure.

Depending upon the duration of the potential ICS application outage caused by a disruption, operational recovery plans for short-term outages and disaster recovery plans for long-term outages must be formulated. It is also important to employ physical security for areas of a production site that house data acquisition and control systems that might have higher-level risks. Your business continuity plan should specify system and data recovery procedures for your systems. Once the recovery procedures are documented, a schedule should be developed to test the recovery procedures. Particular attention must be paid to the verification of backups of system configuration data and product or production data. The procedures should be reviewed periodically.

If you are accessing cloud-based solutions, ensure that systems are available at all times. In case of a disaster, services should switch to a new physical location to provide continued service.