When systems stop, leadership matters.
Work through a fictional outage. Make four decisions and explore what each one means for recovery readiness.
Who owns the first decisions?
You are the technology lead for a fictional Houston-area distributor. Make the leadership decision, then inspect its consequences.
Order processing is unavailable after a storage alert. The cause is unconfirmed. Dispatch is due in two hours; email still works. The operations manager asks whether staff should keep retrying.
Reviewing an earlier decision is allowed. Changing it clears later decisions so the story stays consistent.
Practice before the pressure arrives.
This is an original educational scenario, not a live incident tool. A real exercise should use your service dependencies, authorized response plan, business owners, and recovery evidence.
Discuss recovery readinessNIST SP 800-184: Guide for Cybersecurity Event Recovery
Sections 2 and 3 discuss recovery planning, coordination, communications, exercises, and improvement. This original KAISAN outage scenario applies related planning principles; it is not a NIST exercise or certification.