Continuity & recovery: plan before failure.

Start with business impact

Business continuity planning keeps essential activities running, possibly in a degraded mode. Disaster recovery planning restores them after disruption. Both extend beyond servers: people, premises, suppliers and communications can all become critical dependencies.

Set RTO and RPO per service

RTO is the target recovery time. RPO is the maximum acceptable data loss expressed as time. These are objectives to match against available capabilities, not automatic outcomes of purchasing a product. Business owners must validate them and prioritise services.

• Map DNS, IAM, network, data and supplier dependencies.
• Consider local failure, site loss, corruption and compromise.
• Include detection, decision and validation time in recovery scenarios.

Write an executable procedure

Specify who authorises failover, how to reach responders, where emergency credentials are stored and the recovery order. Include user communications and criteria for returning to normal operations. Keep documentation accessible when the primary system is unavailable.

Test, time and improve

Tabletop exercises test decisions. Isolated restores test data. Controlled failovers test architecture and procedures. Record gaps between targets and results, and update plans after significant changes. Following a compromise, recovery must avoid reintroducing the threat.