CISSP 18.3 - Recovery Strategy (Part 1 of 2)

This episode of the ISC2 Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) exam prep series works through the choices in Domain 7 that shape a rapid, orderly recovery. It covers the decisions that must be settled before the experts are even in the room, so the first employee to arrive after a crisis can start recovery from a clear playbook rather than wait for the team to assemble.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does insurance fit into your recovery strategy?

Insurance cushions the financial blow, but only if you buy the right coverage. The trap is settling for actual cash value, which pays out the depreciated market value of your damaged property, often far below what replacement really costs, so insist on a replacement cost clause or your organization pays the gap out of pocket. Many providers now offer cybersecurity liability policies covering breaches of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, so read the fine print before disaster, not after.

How do you decide what to restore first?

You rank your business units and functions by priority so the most critical come back first, and your business impact analysis is the perfect input because it already identifies which units are vital and puts a cost on failure. Watch one subtle point: critical functions do not always live inside your most critical units, so your final list is a superset of both. Often the smartest move is partial restoration, bringing your top unit to half capacity, then lower units online, reaching a minimum operating level before chasing full recovery.

How do crisis management and emergency communications keep order?

When disaster hits, panic sets in, and panic is the enemy of a good plan, so the antidote is continuous training that lets the people most likely to spot trouble, like guards and technical staff, act on reflex. Communication is the other half: internally, employees need to know whether to come in or report elsewhere, and externally, if you go silent the public assumes the worst, so route all media questions to public relations. Remember the very disaster may have knocked out your normal communication channels.

What is workgroup recovery really aiming for?

Workgroup recovery keeps the real goal in view, which is getting teams back to doing their actual work, not just powering systems back on, since it is easy to treat recovery as a pure technology exercise and forget the people. Sometimes the best move is separate recovery facilities for different workgroups, and if a sister site already does similar work, you might temporarily relocate a team there and let them coordinate electronically. This approach also helps larger organizations that could never find one facility big enough to house the entire operation at once.

What is a cold site?

A cold site is bare standby space, big enough for your operations, with working power and environmental systems but nothing else: no computers, no software, no active broadband links, maybe a few phone lines. Its appeal is cost, because there is almost nothing to maintain while it sits idle. The drawback is brutal, since bringing it live means hauling in and configuring every server, restoring data from backups, and lighting up communications, a process often measured in weeks, which makes it the hardest option to test.

Reference: This article is based on concepts discussed in CISSP 18.3 - Recovery Strategy (Part 1 of 2).