About this episode

This episode discusses the importance of disaster recovery planning in K-12 education and provides insights into operational execution and recovery strategies.

In Part Two of our Disaster Preparedness series, we move from strategic alignment to operational execution. After exploring how districts define recovery priorities in advance of a crisis, this episode takes a deep dive into the CoSN Disaster Recovery Plan Template —a structured, leadership-driven framework developed by the CoSN Cybersecurity Advisory to formalize and validate recovery planning. We examine what truly happens when critical systems go down—whether it’s a Student Information System outage, authentication failure, cloud disruption, or infrastructure breakdown—and why even seemingly “small” technical incidents can quickly escalate into instructional and operational disruptions without a clearly documented, tested recovery plan. You’ll learn: Why disaster recovery must be documented, accessible, and validated How system location (on-prem, cloud, hybrid) changes your recovery strategy The importance of a leadership-approved recovery order How identifying dependencies and connections eliminates guesswork during restoration Why RTO and RPO are organizational decisions—not just technical settings How to prevent single points of failure with primary, backup, and vendor…

Topics covered

• disaster recovery
• K-12 education
• crisis management
• operational execution
• leadership in education
• system outages

Keywords

• disaster recovery
• K-12
• recovery plan
• system outages
• leadership
• communication strategy
• RTO
• RPO

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: CoSN, CoSN Cybersecurity Advisory, K-12

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