2 cissp ® Official Study Guide Eighth Edition

Workgroup Recovery
When designing a disaster recovery plan, it’s important to keep your goal in mind—the res-
toration 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 ready to return to the main operations facility.
Larger organizations may have difficulty finding recovery facilities capable of handling the 
entire business operation. This is another example of a circumstance in which independent 
recovery of different workgroups is appropriate.
Alternate Processing Sites
One of the most important elements of the disaster recovery plan is the selection of alter-
nate processing sites to be used when the primary sites are unavailable. Many options are 

---

Recovery Strategy 
821
available when considering recovery facilities, limited only by the creative minds of disaster 
recovery planners and service providers. In the following sections, we cover several types of 
sites commonly used in disaster recovery planning: cold sites, warm sites, hot sites, mobile 
sites, service bureaus, and multiple sites. 
When choosing any alternate processing site, be sure to situate it far away 
enough from your primary location that it won’t be affected by the same 
disaster that disables your primary site. But it should be close enough that 
it takes less than a full day’s drive to reach it.