Site Planning

Generally, an organization's primary location is selected for business reasons other than security. However, when planning for the alternate site, organizations must consider the alternate site should be physically far away enough so that it is not affected by any contingency that affects the primary production environment, but close enough that key personnel can reach the alternate site in times of crisis.

The alternate site should be geographically distinct from the primary site and provide processing capability if the primary site is not available.

This is often difficult when dealing with a catastrophic event. Whether it is hurricanes, earthquakes, or human-made disruptions, such as failure of the power grid or war, the effect of a catastrophe can be very broad.

The alternate processing capability may be addressed using a physical processing site or other alternatives, such as failover to a cloud service provider (CSP) or other internally or externally provided processing service. Geographically distributed architectures that support contingency requirements may also be considered alternate processing sites.

Once a location has been selected for an organization's alternate site, responsibility for its maintenance and preparation needs to be clearly assigned. If the location is owned by the organization, those responsibilities are relatively cleareverything is the responsibility of the organization.

However, if the location is not under the direct control of the organization, the contractual relationship will be the critical tool to define those responsibilities.

Typically, controls covered by alternate processing site agreements include the environmental conditions at alternate sites, access rules, physical and environmental protection requirements, and the coordination for the transfer and assignment of personnel.

Requirements identified in contingency plans to maintain essential mission and business functions despite disruption, compromise, or failure in organizational systems must be addressed in the selection and preparation of the alternate processing site.

Like all organizational assets, the alternate site should be subject to its own risk assessment. Threats that affect alternate sites need to be factored into the organizational assessments of risk and include natural disasters, structural failures, hostile attacks, and errors of omission or commission. Organizations determine what is considered a sufficient degree of separation between primary and alternate processing sites based on the types of threats that are of concern.

Area-wide disruptions refer to those types of disruptions that are broad in geographic scope with such determinations made by organizations based on organizational assessments of risk.

Site preparation includes establishing configuration settings for systems at the alternate processing site consistent with the requirements for such settings at the primary site and ensuring that essential supplies and logistical considerations are in place.