Deeper Dive: Incorporating Incident Response Into Disaster Recovery Plans

Incident response and disaster recovery are both essential components of a comprehensive written information security program. However, too often these plans are implemented in a vacuum, without considering the potential synergies and improvements that can be gained when such plans are developed, deployed and tested together.

Incident response and disaster recovery tend to have the same goals, i.e., to provide a game plan that outlines how the organization will respond to and recover from an event. The key difference is often the type of events. Incident response tends to focus on events that impact computer systems and personal information, such as malware or network intrusion. On the other hand, disaster recovery tends to focus on larger, enterprise-wide events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and terrorism. The fallacy is thinking these categories are mutually exclusive. Consider the impact of ransomware, which according to BakerHostetler's 2017 Date Security