Keeping critical IT services available during a data center outage starts with knowing which services matter most, what each one depends on, and what tested procedure will sustain or restore it. Build a continuity plan that combines an alternate recovery location, power continuity, recoverable backups and manual workarounds: each addresses a different failure mode, and none is a substitute for the others.
Decide what must stay available first
Start with a business impact analysis (BIA), not a product purchase. Identify the services essential to the organization’s mission and operations, the consequences if each is unavailable, and the order in which they need to be sustained or restored. CISA’s CRR Supplemental Resource Guide, Volume 6: Service Continuity treats service identification and prioritization as foundational to continuity planning.
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For each service, record the business owner, technical owner, users, acceptable outage impact, supporting systems and data, required facilities, staff, and outside providers. Set recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO) from the organization’s own impact analysis, contractual commitments, and applicable requirements. CISA’s cited guidance supports prioritization and dependency planning; it does not prescribe universal numerical targets.
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Make the resulting priority order usable during an incident. A service that looks important in an application inventory may depend on identity, DNS, storage, or a network path that must be restored earlier. Record those enabling services alongside the business-facing service, so responders can see what has to work before recovery can succeed.
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Map dependencies and look for shared failure points
Trace each priority service from the people using it through the systems and facilities that deliver it. Include dependencies that are easy to overlook, such as power and fuel, cooling and facility operations, telecom and internet connections, identity and DNS, storage and databases, cloud platforms or SaaS providers, staff access, and suppliers where they apply.
CISA’s Infrastructure Dependency Primer: Learn describes physical, geographic, cyber, and logical dependencies, including mutual dependencies and cascading impacts. Its practical implication is that a failure can spread beyond the facility where it began: a service may be unavailable because a connected provider, network, utility, or enabling system is affected.
For every backup or alternate arrangement, check whether it relies on the same potential failure domain as the primary service. Ask whether a secondary provider, link, or site shares a region, carrier, utility, upstream platform, or other critical dependency. This is a planning check, not an assumption that every provider shares one. CISA’s Infrastructure Dependency Primer: Implement discusses backup providers and continuity arrangements in the context of dependencies.
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- Show the dependency chain for each priority service, including who operates each component and how responders reach them.
- Mark dependencies that are shared across several services; an outage there could affect multiple priorities at once.
- Document known alternatives and the steps, access, people, and information needed to use them.
Prepare a recovery path when the facility is lost
A plan for a power interruption inside an otherwise usable building is not enough if the data center itself is inaccessible or unavailable. CISA’s Service Continuity guide describes recovering essential services at an alternate location when the facility that houses them is lost. The organization must decide which alternate arrangement fits its services; the cited guidance does not establish that a particular active-active, active-passive, cloud, or colocation design is right for every environment.
Document a facility-loss procedure that responders can follow without relying on access to the affected site. It should identify who declares the incident, who authorizes failover or recovery, how staff and decision-makers communicate, which dependencies must be restored first, and what evidence is required before a service is declared recovered. Include the contact and access steps needed to reach the alternate location and its providers.
- Declare and prioritize: Use the agreed incident authority and service restoration order to decide which services the response will address.
- Establish communications: Contact technical teams, business owners, facilities staff, and relevant providers through the documented channels, including alternatives if normal communications are disrupted.
- Restore prerequisites: Bring up required access, connectivity, identity, data, platforms, and other dependencies in the order established for each service.
- Validate service: Have the appropriate technical and business owners check that the service and its essential functions work before it is represented as recovered.
- Manage the transition: Document decisions and coordinate any return to normal operations as part of the recovery procedure.
Use power continuity for the failure it is designed to address
Power disruption can interrupt otherwise recoverable services. CISA’s Infrastructure Dependency Primer: Implement identifies permanent generators, portable generators, and battery backup systems as possible measures to help key facilities operate during power disruption. A suitable uninterruptible power supply (UPS) may help protect critical equipment or bridge a short interruption, but a consumer or rack UPS is not a data-center power plan and does not imply a fixed runtime.
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Power protection only helps the equipment and loads it is designed to support. Site-specific decisions about generator capacity, transfer equipment, fuel supply, maintenance, and environmental or code obligations require qualified facility analysis and applicable local requirements; those details are not established by the cited continuity guidance. Include power equipment and its supporting dependencies in the same service maps and exercises as IT systems.
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Plan for cyber disruption as well as physical outage
A facility outage may coincide with a cyber incident, or recovery may require isolating affected systems. In that situation, simply bringing systems back online can risk reintroducing a threat. CISA’s cyber-resilience guidance emphasizes understanding IT and operational technology (OT) dependencies, maintaining and exercising continuity plans, preparing workarounds or manual controls where relevant, backing up IT and OT data, testing backups, isolating backups from connections that could spread malware, and documenting configuration settings needed for recovery.
CISA’s #StopRansomware Guide recommends offline encrypted backups and prioritizing restoration around critical services. Keep recovery data and procedures usable when normal systems are unavailable, and make the restoration order consistent with the organization’s service priorities. The plan should specify who decides that systems are safe to restore and what checks are required, rather than treating backup availability alone as proof that service can return.
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Use manual workarounds where technology cannot be restored in time
Some essential business activities may need a temporary manual process while the supporting IT service is unavailable or deliberately isolated. Identify those activities with business owners, define who can authorize the workaround, and document how staff will record transactions, communicate status, protect sensitive information, and reconcile work when normal systems return. CISA’s cyber-resilience guidance specifically includes workarounds and manual controls where relevant; the right process depends on the organization’s operations.
Test that people can actually perform the workaround with the information, authority, and communication channels available during an outage. A paper or offline process that no one can access, understand, or reconcile is not an operational continuity measure.
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Compare recovery options by the services and dependencies they cover, the disruption they are intended to tolerate, their independence from the same site or upstream failure, whether they meet the organization’s own recovery objectives, and whether people have exercised the procedure. Also account for staffing, operational complexity, and ongoing cost. CISA’s guidance does not provide a universal scoring method or numerical threshold, so apply criteria that reflect the organization’s impact analysis and requirements.
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| Continuity measure | What it addresses | Planning question |
|---|---|---|
| Alternate recovery location | Loss or inaccessibility of the facility that houses essential services; CISA Service Continuity guide. | Can priority services and their dependencies be recovered at a location that remains usable? |
| Generator or battery backup | Power disruption affecting key facilities or equipment; CISA Infrastructure Dependency Primer: Implement. | Which loads and facility functions does the arrangement support, and what does it depend on? |
| Backups and recovery documentation | Data loss, system restoration, and cyber recovery; CISA cyber-resilience guidance and #StopRansomware Guide. | Are recovery data isolated as needed, tested, and sufficient to rebuild services in the required order? |
| Manual workaround | Temporary continuation of selected business activities when a service cannot be used; CISA cyber-resilience guidance. | Can authorized staff perform, record, communicate, and later reconcile the work? |
Exercise the plan and improve it
CISA’s Service Continuity guide describes tested or exercised plans as a way to make continuity more predictable and consistent. An exercise should test both the technical recovery and the human process: alerting, decisions, provider coordination, alternate access, restoration order, recovery data, service validation, and the return to normal operations.
Use findings to update dependency maps, contacts, procedures, and recovery assumptions. CISA’s detailed Service Continuity guide includes a sample policy calling for annual testing; that is an example, not a universal legal requirement. Set a schedule appropriate to the organization’s risk, regulatory obligations, and rate of change, and exercise again when material systems, providers, facilities, or procedures change.
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