A government contractor must be able to keep its essential business functions running during a disruption that could last weeks, including relocating staff to an alternate facility and defining succession for key roles. Which document should describe these arrangements?

A continuity of operations plan defines how an organization sustains its essential functions during and after a significant disruption. It identifies those functions, the alternate facilities where work continues, orders of succession and delegations of authority, essential records and systems, communications and the procedures for activating and returning from continuity operations. For database teams, it determines which databases support essential functions and therefore which must be recovered first and where. A system security plan documents a specific system's security requirements, boundary and controls; it does not plan for relocating staff or succession. An incident response playbook guides the detection, containment, eradication and recovery steps for security incidents; it is narrower and shorter-term than sustaining the whole organization through weeks of disruption. A data dictionary describes data elements, their definitions, types and relationships; it is valuable documentation for rebuilding databases but has nothing to do with continuity arrangements. Exam caveat: COOP is organization-wide and function-focused, while a disaster recovery plan for a database focuses on restoring that system; the two must align on priorities. Operational check: confirm that each essential function in the COOP plan maps to the databases that support it and that those databases' recovery objectives are consistent with the plan.