Page 1310 - (ISC)² CISSP Certified Information Systems Security Professional Official Study Guide

budget permits, investing in crisis training for your key employees is a
good idea. This ensures that at least some of your employees know

how to handle emergency situations properly and can provide all-
important “on-the-scene” leadership to panic-stricken co-workers.

Emergency Communications

When a disaster strikes, it is important that the organization be able to
communicate internally as well as with the outside world. A disaster of

any significance is easily noticed, but if an organization is unable to
keep the outside world informed of its recovery status, the public is apt
to fear the worst and assume that the organization is unable to
recover. It is also essential that the organization be able to
communicate internally during a disaster so that employees know
what is expected of them—whether they are to return to work or report
to another location, for instance.

In some cases, the circumstances that brought about the disaster to
begin with may have also damaged some or all normal means of
communications. A violent storm or an earthquake may have also
knocked out telecommunications systems; at that point, it’s too late to
try to figure out other means of communicating both internally and
externally.

Workgroup Recovery

When designing a disaster recovery plan, it’s important to keep your
goal in mind—the restoration of workgroups to the point that they can
resume their activities in their usual work locations. It’s easy to get
sidetracked and think of disaster recovery as purely an IT effort

focused on restoring systems and processes to working order.

To facilitate this effort, it’s sometimes best to develop separate
recovery facilities for different workgroups. For example, if you have
several subsidiary organizations that are in different locations and that
perform tasks similar to the tasks that workgroups at your office
perform, you may want to consider temporarily relocating those
workgroups to the other facility and having them communicate

electronically and via telephone with other business units until they’re