Question

Describe what contingency planning is and how it relates to incident response planning, disaster recovery planning, and business continuity plans

Answer 1

Contingency planning is a set of actions planned to help an organization in the event of any unforeseen situation or incident. This may or may not happen, but to have a plan B for these uncertain situations makes sure that there is no or minimal impact on operations of a business. Incident response planning, Disaster recovery planning, and business continuity plans form steps in the overall process that is known as Contingency planning. Let me explain each step that translates into CP:

The first step in Contingency planning is Risk identification. Through this, an organization would be able to classify the type of risks they might encounter based on the nature of business. Risks can be different and important and thus it is important to have a ranking system in place for the categories of risks identified through this process.

The next step in Contingency planning is Incident response planning. This is important as dealing with an incident makes sure that the incident does not translate into disaster. This process involves assumptions of every threat, to plan for the next course of steps to be taken to mitigate, respond and recover from the incident. This process includes actions that would be taken to mitigate the incident before the incident takes place. The next plan lists out steps to be taken to absolve the threat and the last plan is, how to recover when the incident or threat has been handled. The whole idea of this planning is to make sure that business operations are not affected due to any incidence.

The next step in Contingency planning is Disaster recovery planning. As advised in the above step, incidents sometimes translates into Disaster. These disasters include any natural devastation or man-made devastation like fire break out. This planning also includes actions to be taken before, during and after a disaster has struck. This can often be related to insurance plans. The core of the process is to be able to mitigate, process and recover from the disaster much like incident planning.

The next step is BCP (Business continuity planning) which is a subset of Disaster recovery and is a plan created to make sure that operations continue while disaster is mitigated and recovered from. BCP includes a list of all events that could impact a business continuity negatively and the steps to be taken in such scenarios so that operations can get back to normal. The outcome of having BCP in place is Business continuity through having proper backup sites, servers to make sure that business operations continue.