Business Continuity Strategies
What you must understand
Strategy selection translates BIA requirements into recovery approaches. Candidates must compare options across the resources they protect: people (alternate work arrangements, cross-training), facilities (alternate site, reciprocal agreement, work-from-home), technology (hot/warm/cold site, redundancy, replication, cloud), data (backup, replication, RPO alignment), and suppliers (alternate sources). Know trade-offs: cost vs recovery speed vs risk. Understand recovery vs continuity - continuity keeps the business running during disruption; recovery restores normal operations. Recognize the spectrum of technology strategies and their RTO/RPO fit.
Traps in questions
- Choosing the most resilient (and expensive) strategy when the BIA does not require it; strategy must be justified by the BIA.
- Confusing backup with replication: backups support RPO through restore; replication supports near-zero RPO.
- Assuming a hot site is always best; cost and over-engineering are common wrong answers.
- Ignoring people and manual workarounds as valid strategies for short outages.
Worked example / rule of thumb
A function has a 4-hour RTO and 15-minute RPO. Cold site and tape backup fail both. Warm site with replication fits. Rule of thumb: match strategy to the tightest of RTO/RPO, then confirm cost is proportionate to impact. If the option exceeds requirements significantly, look for the proportionate alternative.