Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Question 1

Business Continuity Institute (BCI)

Answer 1

An extension/ improvement to the previous professional practices document. This domain closely maps to the format and terminology of the BCI GPG documents.

Question 2

Business Continuity Plan

Answer 2

Addresses business disruption, interruption, or loss from the initial response to the point at which normal business operations are resumed.

Question 3

Business Standards Institution (BS 25999)

Answer 3

Represents a framework for resilience and success for a company to enact and follow.

Question 4

Checklist or Desk Check

Answer 4

Participants review plan contents and check information such as phone numbers, equipment, and locations.

Question 5

Cold site

Answer 5

An empty data center with heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) and power.

Question 6

Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII)

Answer 6

Information can be found here for various certifications for business continuity management.

Question 7

Emergency Operations Center (EOC)

Answer 7

Central management point for a crisis. The staff assigned to it must be able to handle the stress and decision-making responsibilities associated with a disaster.

Question 8

Full Interruption Test

Answer 8

Primary operations are shut down and continuity relies solely on recovery procedure accuracy, completeness, and personnel ability.

Question 9

Hot site

Answer 9

Features fully provisioned IT and offices. Data must be retrieved and loaded before operations are resumed. Some commercial hot sites allow data backups to be stored nearby for a fee.

Question 10

Incident Management Plan (IMP)

Answer 10

Defines how the strategic issues of a crisis affecting the organization would be addressed and managed by the chief executive/ senior managers.

Question 11

Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD)

Answer 11

The time by which the business MUST recover critical services.

Question 12

Parallel testing

Answer 12

Basically an operations test to show that critical systems can be run at the alternate site.

Question 13

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Answer 13

Measures the tolerance for data loss.

Question 14

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Answer 14

This is the time by which the organization would LIKE to recover.

Question 15

Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Answer 15

Can relate to acceptable outage times, committed repair times, maintenance windows, and operational and performance standards.

Question 16

Simulations

Answer 16

Typically include a pretend disaster, and all teams exercise their training and judgment and simulate their actions.

Question 17

Structured walk-throughs

Answer 17

Team members meet and discuss each plan element and procedure across several meetings. They step through the plans and have some role interaction, but all is done within the confines of the conference room.

Question 18

Warm site

Answer 18

Has some common IT, communications, power, and HVAC. IT equipment (such as servers and communications) must be procured and transferred to the site, and the data must be retrieved and loaded.