Build an alternate-worksite plan around identity, connectivity, data, and people

Source facts: continuity capability combines people, facilities, communications, and information

FEMA’s Continuity Guidance Circular presents continuity concepts including essential functions, orders of succession, delegations of authority, continuity facilities, communications, essential records, human capital, devolution, reconstitution, testing, training, and exercises. These elements show why an alternate facility cannot succeed as an isolated real-estate decision.

NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1 connects information-system contingency planning to business impact analysis, preventive controls, recovery strategies, plan development, testing, training, exercises, and maintenance. It emphasizes selecting strategies according to system impact and recovery requirements.

FEMA guidance often describes public-sector continuity targets and models. Those materials can inform commercial planning, but they are not automatically contractual requirements for a private organization. The business impact analysis, safety obligations, laws, contracts, insurer conditions, and actual architecture govern the plan.

DSE recommendation: prove the alternate site can perform priority work

Design from required outcomes: who must do which work, by when, using what information and authority, when the primary workplace or technology path is unavailable.

Define essential workflows and tolerances. Use the business impact analysis to identify priority services, minimum staffing, recovery time, acceptable backlog, maximum interruption, data needs, dependencies, peak periods, and manual alternatives. Avoid planning to reproduce every normal capability immediately.

Select a strategy by scenario. Compare remote work, another company facility, contracted workspace, reciprocal arrangement, mobile capability, and distributed teams against regional outage, building denial, cyber incident, carrier failure, public-health event, and staff displacement. One alternate location may share the same hazard as the primary.

Prepare people and authority. Maintain call trees, succession, delegations, role assignments, accessibility needs, travel and family considerations, safety, transportation, lodging, and alternates. Make essential contacts and authority records available when primary identity or document systems are unavailable.

Engineer identity and devices. Provide managed endpoints, phishing-resistant authentication where supported, emergency accounts with controlled custody, privileged access, software, certificates, chargers, spares, secure configuration, replacement and wipe procedures. Test first-time sign-in and recovery without relying on the unavailable office.

Provide diverse communications and connectivity. Validate internet, voice, collaboration, VPN or zero-trust access, DNS, identity reachability, carrier diversity, power, capacity, and support. Document degraded modes and prevent the alternate path from bypassing segmentation or monitoring.

Protect data and records. Identify authoritative records, offline or protected copies, synchronization, recovery point, encryption, access, printing, disposal, transport, and return. Prevent local convenience copies from becoming ungoverned long-term systems of record.

Exercise activation through reconstitution. Trigger notification, travel or remote activation, identity, connectivity, application access, a representative workflow, communications, shift turnover, outage support, and return to normal operations. Capture decisions, timings, failures, workarounds, and corrective actions.

Plan for the alternate location itself to fail or become unavailable. Identify the decision point for moving to distributed work, a second location, manual service, or temporary suspension. Preserve current reservations, access instructions, keys or badges, equipment assignments, and supplier escalation without exposing the site’s security details more broadly than necessary.

Include sustained operations, not only first-day activation. Exercise shift coverage, fatigue, supervision, replenishment, secure disposal, software updates, device replacement, helpdesk, privileged administration, backup jobs, incident response, mail and deliveries, financial approvals, and reconciliation of work created while systems were degraded. Set conditions for safe reconstitution at the primary site.

Factual boundary: The cited federal guidance provides planning models, not a universal mandate or proof that a commercial arrangement is sufficient. Employee safety, labor, accessibility, privacy, insurance, lease, regulatory, customer, and technology requirements require appropriate qualified review.

Measure activation time, reachable staff, authentication success, usable capacity, essential workflow completion, data reconciliation, unplanned dependencies, and corrective-action closure. A signed contract for space is not continuity evidence; a safely exercised operating capability is.

Official references

FEMA, Continuity Guidance Circular.

NIST, SP 800-34 Rev. 1: Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems.