Disaster Recovery

Learning outcomes:

Explain why organizations need a disaster recovery plan
Identify risks, and prioritize them in a plan
Describe the roles and responsibilities on a disaster recovery team
Explain how disaster recovery and business continuity plans are tested, including checklists

Disasters such as accidents, acts of nature etc. Need to have a plan in place to recovery from that
Assume nothing will work, you can't rely on your current system, communication, phone or anything
Think about natural disasters such as snow storms, hurricanes and what the plan is if your company is in the path of that

C Suite people
IT people
Sales
Accounting and finance
Basically everyone from every place you picked for a CERT team you'll need here
Including an alternate (just like for CERT) in case of emergencies, to have a backup and make sure there are no bottlenecks of knowledge

Such as once a day back up new data, once a week back up new data and programs, once a month back up everything byte by byte.
Backup what you're not willing to lose and set your backup to happen as often as you are willing to redo work (you're willing to redo a day of work? Backup once a day, willing to lose an hours' worth? Back up every hour

Note: We can have issues if everything isn't documented well and the person/people who made the agreements and plans aren't there or forget to pass along the message
People

Never have 1 person in charge of so much they are the single point of failure. Your plan should never be "that person"
Need info on each of the systems
Need passwords, who knows them? Who's the backup? Where are they written down? How often is the backup updated (Spoiler: Should be updated whenever the password or plan changes)
Need someone that knows the infrastructure
What's your business continuity plan?

We need to run simulations and war games. We don't know if our plan works unless we test it

Example: We put our whole plan in a binder in a locked safe that we can all get to. Yay? What if there is a fire and we evacuate the building(s). Where is our backup of the plan? Who knows what we do next?

When we find errors we need to update the plan AND the documentation of the plan
We should test once a year at minimum.

Suggested Activities and Discussion Topics:

In a group of 2-4 Come up with a Disaster Recovery plan for a local small Business following the documentation and best practices provided.
As a small group read pick a recent (within the last year) company disaster of some variety and discuss how they did in relation to the Cisco Best Practices Example
Write a Disaster Recovery Plan for yourself and your household. Remember to include all your assets and risks. This is likely to look different then a large company so you are going to have a shorter plan and no teams, but you can still put together a small checklist and plan for yourself/household
Discussion: which is worse for a small business, a fire that destroys the office or ransomware that encrypts every file? Think about what each one takes away and how long recovery would take.
Tabletop exercise: a burst pipe floods the server closet of a 20 person accounting firm on the Monday before the tax deadline. In small groups, walk through the first 24 hours. Who do you call first? What do you need to keep working? What do you wish you had planned for?

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