Continuity of Operations, often shortened to COOP, is the planning and set of procedures that keep essential services running during and after a disruption. In cyber security, that means more than backups: it includes defined roles, alternate systems, redundant communication paths, recovery priorities, and tested fallback procedures for authentication, monitoring, and service delivery.
COOP matters because many attacks and outages do not need to fully break a system to cause damage. If a one-time password service, alerting platform, or recovery channel fails, users may be locked out and operators may lose visibility even while core servers are online. Good COOP reduces single points of failure by separating primary and recovery paths, using secondary providers where needed, and regularly testing failover. In defense, it turns resilience into an operational control instead of an afterthought.