Certified: The GIAC GSLC Audio Course

In this episode, we focus on business continuity planning as the discipline that keeps core functions alive when disruption arrives, whether the disruption is cyber, operational, vendor-related, or simply the kind of cascading failure that complex organizations occasionally produce. Continuity planning is often treated as a binder exercise, but when it is built around real dependencies and realistic workarounds, it becomes one of the most practical tools a security leader can support. The point is not to predict every possible crisis. The point is to understand what the business must keep doing, what those activities depend on, and how to keep them moving when systems are degraded or unavailable. Leaders care because outages are not only technical events; they are business trust events, and trust is damaged when payroll fails, customer commitments break, or safety procedures cannot be executed. A continuity plan that reflects reality reduces chaos during incidents and accelerates recovery because decisions are pre-aligned to business priorities.

Before we continue, a quick note: this audio course is a companion to our course companion books. The first book is about the exam and provides detailed information on how to pass it best. The second book is a Kindle-only eBook that contains 1,000 flashcards that can be used on your mobile device or Kindle. Check them both out at Cyber Author dot me, in the Bare Metal Study Guides Series.

The starting move is defining critical services in business language, not tool names, because continuity is about outcomes, not infrastructure. A business service is something the organization does that creates value, meets obligations, or keeps people safe. It might be paying employees, delivering products, supporting customers, billing and collections, onboarding new hires, shipping goods, maintaining clinical operations, or sustaining safety monitoring in an industrial environment. Tool names, like a specific payroll platform or ticketing system, are not the service. They are implementation details that may change over time. When continuity planning starts with tools, it becomes fragile and quickly outdated because tools evolve. When continuity planning starts with business services, it remains stable and portable even as technologies shift. Leaders should also insist on defining these services in terms stakeholders understand, because continuity planning must be shared across business and technical teams. If the service definition is jargon-heavy, owners will not engage, and the plan will fail when it is needed. Plain language is a resilience feature.

Once services are defined, you map dependencies across people, vendors, systems, and facilities, because continuity is fundamentally the management of dependencies. People dependencies include roles that must be present, such as payroll administrators, finance approvers, customer support leads, or operational supervisors. Vendor dependencies include outsourced platforms, third-party service providers, and partners who provide data, processing, or physical delivery. System dependencies include identity services, network connectivity, databases, endpoints, and the applications that support the service. Facilities dependencies include office access, manufacturing sites, data centers, power, and communication pathways. Leaders should encourage teams to map dependencies in a way that reflects how work really happens, not how diagrams suggest it happens. Many critical services fail not because the core application is down, but because a hidden dependency breaks, such as authentication, a vendor integration, or a key person being unavailable. The dependency map becomes the true continuity artifact because it reveals where disruption will bite first.

Dependency mapping must also include fragile handoffs, because handoffs are where process breaks under stress. A handoff is any point where one team must pass information, approval, or action to another team, especially when the handoff relies on a single channel or a single person. Fragility emerges when the handoff depends on informal knowledge, a manual step that few people understand, or a system that is assumed to be available. Leaders should ask simple questions to surface fragility. Who approves the final step, and what happens if they are unavailable. How does the process proceed if the primary tool is down, and is that alternative safe. What data must be available, and where is it stored. Which vendor must respond, and what is the fallback if they do not. By identifying fragile handoffs, you uncover the real continuity risk, because the core service may be robust while the handoffs are brittle. Reducing handoff fragility often produces large resilience gains with relatively small investment. It also reduces stress during disruptions because teams know how to proceed without improvisation.

This naturally leads to identifying single points of failure, because single points of failure are the places where one break stops the entire service. A single point of failure can be a system, like a sole identity provider or a single integration gateway, but it can also be a person, like the only employee who knows how to run a critical settlement process. It can also be a vendor dependency, such as a third-party service that has no practical alternative, or a facility dependency, like a single site where a physical process must occur. Leaders should push the organization to be honest about these because denial does not reduce risk. When you identify them, you can decide which ones to address and which ones to accept, but you cannot make those decisions if the single points are invisible. Addressing them might involve redundancy, alternate procedures, cross-training, and contractual arrangements with vendors. It might also involve simplifying the process so fewer dependencies are required under degraded operations. Continuity improves when you design for failure as a normal condition rather than as an embarrassing exception.

Recovery priorities must be aligned with revenue, safety, and legal obligations, because continuity planning is ultimately a prioritization discipline. Not all services can be restored at once, and during a disruption, time and resources are limited. Revenue alignment means you understand which processes generate or protect revenue, such as order fulfillment, billing, and customer support, and how quickly revenue impact grows when they fail. Safety alignment means you understand which processes protect people, such as safety monitoring, emergency communications, and access control, and you treat them as non-negotiable. Legal obligations include payroll, regulatory reporting, contractual service commitments, and any requirements that carry penalties if missed. Leaders should insist that these priorities are agreed upon before incidents, because during an incident, priorities often become contested and political. When priorities are pre-aligned, responders can make decisions faster and justify them more easily. This also prevents the common mistake where the loudest stakeholder wins rather than the most critical process. Continuity planning is where you establish a fair and defensible priority order that holds under stress.

A frequent pitfall is planning for everything equally and protecting nothing well, because equal priority is the same as no priority. When teams try to make every process critical, the plan becomes too large to maintain and too vague to execute. This also leads to diluted investment, where resources are spread thinly across many processes without meaningfully strengthening any of them. Leaders should encourage an honest tiering mindset, where a small number of processes are truly critical in the first hours and days of disruption, while others can tolerate longer outages. This is not about undervaluing parts of the business. It is about focusing continuity energy where failure would cause the greatest harm. When you acknowledge that some processes can be delayed safely, you create space to protect the most important ones well. The result is a plan that can actually be executed, because it matches limited crisis resources. Equal planning is comforting, but it is not resilient.

A practical quick win is starting with top processes and expanding steadily, because continuity planning is best built iteratively rather than as a one-time massive project. You begin with a small set of critical processes, map their dependencies, identify single points of failure, and document realistic workarounds. Then you rehearse those workarounds and refine them based on what teams learn. Once that core set is solid, you expand to the next set of processes and repeat. Leaders should favor this approach because it produces usable value quickly and builds organizational confidence. It also prevents the plan from becoming theoretical, because each iteration includes testing and training. Over time, the continuity program grows organically, and each cycle makes the organization more capable. Iteration also helps with change management, because teams can absorb new procedures gradually rather than being overwhelmed by a massive continuity document they never read. Steady expansion is how continuity becomes a program rather than an artifact.

A scenario rehearsal can make the planning discipline vivid, such as a payroll outage that threatens trust and compliance deadlines. Payroll is a useful example because it touches employee trust, legal obligations, and operational stability. In a payroll disruption, the core service is paying employees accurately and on time, not the payroll platform name. Dependencies might include timekeeping systems, approval workflows, bank file transfers, identity and access systems, and the payroll vendor’s availability. Single points of failure might include a single payroll administrator or a specific bank integration that cannot be replicated quickly. Workarounds might include manual approval pathways, alternate file transfer processes, and a defined approach for issuing emergency payments when standard processing fails. Leaders should emphasize that workarounds must be safe, because manual workarounds often increase fraud risk, privacy exposure, and error rates. The rehearsal highlights that continuity planning is about designing a controlled degraded mode, not about improvising under pressure. When you rehearse a payroll outage, you uncover assumptions and missing dependencies quickly, and you strengthen both process and confidence.

Workarounds should be documented in a way that is safe and realistically executable, because a workaround that requires perfect conditions will fail during real disruption. Safe means the workaround maintains appropriate access control, approvals, and privacy protections even when tools are limited. Realistically executable means the steps can be performed by the people who will be present during an incident, using the tools they will have, within the time constraints they will face. Leaders should encourage documentation that is specific enough to follow and simple enough to use. Overly detailed workarounds often fail because they are too complex to execute under stress. Overly vague workarounds fail because they leave too many decisions to improvisation. The right balance describes who does what, what information is required, how approvals occur, and how the process is recorded for later audit. Workarounds also need clear boundaries, including what the workaround can accomplish and what it cannot. When boundaries are explicit, teams avoid unsafe shortcuts that create new incidents.

Training owners is essential because continuity steps must be familiar under stress, and familiarity comes from rehearsal. If the continuity plan is only read once a year, it will not be executed correctly in a real incident. Owners should practice the steps, validate that they have access to required resources, and confirm that dependencies behave as expected. Training should include alternates, because the primary owner may not be available during disruption. Leaders should also recognize that training is not a one-time event. It should be repeated when systems change, when staff changes, and when lessons learned indicate friction. The benefit of training is not only procedural correctness. Training builds confidence and reduces panic, because people who have rehearsed a path are less likely to freeze or improvise dangerously. In continuity, calm matters. Calm is what allows teams to execute controlled degraded modes rather than causing additional damage through rushed decisions.

A useful memory anchor is that critical process plus dependencies equals continuity focus, because it keeps the planning centered on what matters. Critical process refers to the business outcome that must be preserved. Dependencies are the people, vendors, systems, and facilities that make that outcome possible. Continuity focus means you invest effort where the dependency map indicates fragility and single points of failure. This anchor prevents a common drift where continuity planning becomes a list of systems and backups without connection to business outcomes. Leaders can use the anchor to challenge plans that are tool-centric. You ask what business process this protects, what dependencies it assumes, and whether those dependencies are resilient. When the answer is unclear, the plan is not ready. When the answer is clear, the plan can be improved systematically. The anchor also helps during incidents because it gives leaders a quick way to decide what to protect first. You protect the process and its critical dependencies, not everything.

Assumptions must be reviewed regularly because business and systems change, and continuity plans decay if they are not refreshed. New vendors appear, old systems are retired, organizational structures shift, and business priorities evolve. A continuity plan written for last year’s environment may be misleading today, and misleading plans can cause harm when followed during real disruption. Leaders should encourage a review cadence tied to change events, such as major system migrations, vendor changes, and organizational restructuring, as well as periodic calendar reviews. Reviews should focus on dependency changes, single points of failure that have emerged, and workarounds that are no longer feasible. This is also a good time to incorporate lessons learned from incidents and near misses, because those events reveal which assumptions were wrong. Continuity is a living program, and like any living program, it needs maintenance. When maintenance is routine, continuity improves quietly. When maintenance is ignored, continuity fails loudly.

As a mini-review, name three dependencies for one critical process, because this exercise forces you to think beyond the obvious application. Take a process like payroll, order fulfillment, or customer support, and identify people, vendor, and system dependencies that must be present for it to function. You might name a specific approval role, a vendor integration, and an identity service as three dependencies, then ask what happens if each one fails. This is the simplest form of dependency mapping, and it often surfaces single points of failure immediately. Leaders can use this exercise in workshops and tabletop sessions because it is quick and reveals actionable gaps. It also builds shared understanding across business and technical teams because each group sees different dependencies. When teams can name dependencies clearly, they are better prepared to execute controlled workarounds during disruptions. This is the practical muscle continuity planning aims to build.

In conclusion, pick one process to map this week, and choose one that matters enough to justify attention but narrow enough to be mapped quickly. Start by defining the process in business language, then list its dependencies across people, vendors, systems, and facilities. Identify the single points of failure and the fragile handoffs, then define one or two safe workarounds that could keep the process alive during disruption. Finally, identify the owners and alternates who must execute those steps, and schedule a brief rehearsal so the plan becomes familiar rather than theoretical. Continuity planning becomes valuable when it reflects reality, and reality is revealed through dependency mapping and rehearsal. When you build continuity this way, you protect revenue, meet legal obligations, and preserve trust during incidents that would otherwise spiral into broader crisis. Pick the process, map it honestly, and let that be the first iteration of a continuity program that grows steadily and stays aligned with how your business actually runs.