Contingency Management
What the domain really tests
Contingency planning keeps the business alive when systems, people, or facilities fail. Know the family of plans and how they relate: the business continuity plan (BCP) sustains critical business functions during disruption; the disaster recovery plan (DRP) restores technology and data; the crisis management/communications plan handles stakeholders and reputation; and continuity of operations planning addresses essential functions in government or large enterprise contexts. Business impact analysis (BIA) is the analytical foundation - it identifies critical functions, dependencies, and recovery objectives.
Master the time metrics: RTO is the maximum acceptable time to restore a function; RPO is the maximum acceptable data loss measured backward from the failure; MTD/MAO is the longest outage the business can survive before unacceptable harm. Recovery strategies include backups (with restoration testing), replication, redundancy, and alternate sites - hot (ready), warm (partial), cold (space and power only), plus reciprocal agreements and cloud failover. Testing types escalate in rigor: plan review, tabletop exercise, walkthrough, simulation, and full failover/interruption test.
Traps
- Confusing RTO with RPO: time to restore versus data loss window.
- Treating backups as a disaster recovery plan; backups are one component and untested backups are not recoverable backups.
- Choosing a full failover test when the stem says the plan is new or untested - start with tabletop or walkthrough.
- Assuming the BCP and DRP are interchangeable, or that DRP scope covers business processes.
- Forgetting plan maintenance: ownership changes, dependency drift, and annual review requirements.
Rule of thumb
Set RTO and RPO from the BIA, not from technology preference. Technology is then chosen to meet the objective at acceptable cost.
Worked example: A BIA finds order entry supports $2M in daily revenue and can tolerate four hours of outage (RTO = 4h) with at most 15 minutes of lost transactions (RPO = 15m). Hourly backups fail the RPO; the design must move to continuous replication. A cold site cannot meet a 4-hour RTO, so a warm site with pre-staged systems is selected.