Introduction to business continuity and disaster recovery
You learn to understand the business impact of disruption, map critical processes and dependencies, write a simple continuity plan and prove that a backup really restores.
Level 201 · 16 lessons · 15 practice labs
Lessons
Concepts
- Kinds of disruption: nature, technology, people, suppliers
- Continuity, recovery, incident and crisis: four plans
- The resilience mindset
- Quick task: disruption scenarios for an organisation
Analysis
- Mapping processes and dependencies
- Impact that grows over time
- Recovery objectives: RTO, RPO, MTPD
- Single points of failure
- Quick task: a dependency map for one process
Planning
- Continuity strategies
- Backup types and frequency
- A simple continuity plan
- Call trees and contact lists
- Quick task: restore a backup and time it
Finish
- Keeping the plan up to date
- Capstone: a continuity plan for a clinic
Practice labs
- Classify the kind of disruption: Classify twelve events as caused by nature, technology, people or suppliers.
- Which plan kicks in: For eight situations, write which of the incident response, crisis management, business continuity or disaster recovery plans applies.
- Disruption scenarios for an organisation: Write eight disruption scenarios with likelihood and impact for Mercanköşk Otelcilik and pick the three that matter most.
- List a process's dependencies: From a description of an order-taking process, extract the people, system, supplier and facility dependencies.
- Draw a dependency map: Prepare a dependency map, as a text diagram, showing the systems and suppliers behind a clinic's appointment process.
- Find the single points of failure: Find the single points of failure in an accounting office's dependency map and propose a mitigation for each.
- Match RTO, RPO and MTPD: Match ten statements to recovery time objective, recovery point objective or maximum tolerable period of disruption.
- Tabulate impact that grows over time: Score the impact of a four-hour, one-day, three-day and one-week outage on three processes and set the tolerable period.
- Do the objectives match the backups: Compare the recovery objectives of five systems with the current backup frequency and restore time and report the mismatches.
- Choose the backup type: Choose full, incremental or differential backup and its frequency for six scenarios.
- Restore a backup and time it: Restore a folder backup in the lab, verify file integrity and record the elapsed time.
- Compare continuity strategies: Compare working from home, a spare office and outsourcing for a call centre by cost, time and risk and write a recommendation.
- Find the errors in the contact list: Mark the leavers, missing deputies and single-channel entries in an emergency contact list.
- Build a call tree: Prepare a call tree for a fifteen-person office showing who calls whom and what to do if someone cannot be reached.
- A simple continuity plan for a clinic: Write a plan for a Lavinya Klinikleri branch with critical processes, workarounds, roles and an update schedule.
About this course
You learn to understand the business impact of disruption, map critical processes and dependencies, write a simple continuity plan and prove that a backup really restores.
What you will learn
- Concepts
- Analysis
- Planning
- Finish
Prerequisites
Finishing the level 101 courses of the same path, or knowing those topics, is enough.
Lab environment
Lessons run in your own Kali Linux terminal that opens in the browser. Nothing to install; the lab starts clean in every lesson.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this course right for my level?
- The course is at level 201; it assumes you know the topics of the lower-level courses.
- Is there anything to install?
- No. Every lesson runs in your own lab environment that opens in the browser.
- How do lessons work?
- Each lesson has 8 to 10 steps and a short quiz. Early steps show the command to type, later steps give less help; if two attempts fail, the solution opens.
- Can I try it for free?
- Yes. The first three lessons of every course are free.