CMS Security Handbook: The Comprehensive Guide for WordPress®, Joomla!®, Drupal™, and Plone®

Understanding Site and Systems Disaster Planning

During a disaster, people tend to lose their ability to reason and process complex tasks. You can see this phenomenon in the behavior of most people during a severe tragedy or event. They generally have trouble understanding commands. Keep this principle in mind for your plan, and tailor your instructions so that they can be understood simply and easily.

After a crisis passes the average person's ability to think returns to the normal level and, thus, the person is able to mentally process. For more information on this topic, conduct an Internet search for Dr. Robert Chandler and review his work on emergency notification during a crisis. He has done extensive work on the subject, and you will find it valuable.

The purpose of your plan is to prepare for what will be done during a crisis. To be fair, you cannot (nor should not) try to plan for every conceivable event. That's a waste of time and energy. Rather, this plan should be one that covers outages and what you will do to restore service. This plan should be broken down into manageable categories.

You may be a very small business with just a handful of people. Given that, understanding the effective (not perceived) capabilities of your staff is even more important. Operationally, be prepared to test your plan through drills. Using cloud solutions available today from many vendors, setting up a test scenario that will help prevent any interruption to your production systems is ...