8. Contingency Planning and Management Learning objectives of this chapter: Business disruptions, busi-

ness continuity planning (BCP) and business continuity manage-ment (BCM), crisis management, disaster recovery planning and management, incident handling, organisational and performance considerations. Businesses and governments across the globe depend heavily on Information Technology to manage various processes and deliver services. It is thus paramount that the services relying on the under-lying IT systems continue to operate or are minimally disrupted even in the event of major disruptions to the underlying IT and physical infrastructure-for instance, triggered by a major security incident or a natural disaster, and so on. This may be achieved through a gamut of mechanisms, applied individually or in conjunction- for instance, switching the operations to an alternate site, or having back-ups to recover necessary data and information to resume services, have mechanisms in place to carry out some vital services manuall