Where do you start?
Your manager says: "Write us a plan to recover from a disaster." You stare at a blank page.
The answer is three questions. How big is the plan? What facts do we have? What could go wrong, and how bad would it be? This lesson answers them.
Key words
| Word | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | What a plan covers, and what it does not. | |
| Inventory | A list of everything you own. | hardware, software, networks, data |
| Outage | A time when a system is not working. | |
| Asset | Anything the business owns that has value. | |
| Threat | Anything that could cause harm. | |
| Vulnerability | A weak point that an attacker or an accident can use. | |
| Probability | How likely something is to happen. | |
| Impact | The harm if it does happen. | |
| Network | Computers and devices joined together so they can share data. |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
By the end of this lesson
Note
I can define the scope of a recovery plan, gather the facts and risk-assess the assets.
Starter: what you already know
Have a go
Starter: what you already know
3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.
Step 1: define the scope
The scope says how big the plan is. There are four sizes.
Data centre premises: one building full of servers. Organisational: the whole company. Departmental: one team, such as finance. Individual: one person's equipment, such as a laptop.
A clear scope stops a plan from being too big to finish or too small to help.
Step 2: gather the facts
Collect three kinds of fact.
Historic outage details: what has failed before, when and for how long.
Inventories of hardware, software, networks and data. You cannot recover what you did not know you had.
Contact information for everybody involved: staff, suppliers, the building owner and managers.
Check: scope and facts
Have a go
Check: scope and facts
4 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.