Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity
There's no tested disaster recovery plan, backups exist but have never been restored end-to-end, and leadership has started asking what happens if the primary region or a key vendor goes down.
How we tackle it
A backup you haven't restored is a hypothesis, not a plan. We start by defining what recovery time and recovery point actually need to be per system, since not every system justifies multi-region failover, then design the backup, replication, and failover architecture to match, and validate it with an actual drill rather than a tabletop exercise. The goal is a plan the team has executed at least once before they're forced to execute it under real pressure.
Current-state pain points
- Backups exist but have never been test-restored
- No documented recovery time or recovery point objectives for critical systems
- Single-region architecture with no failover plan
- Recovery procedures exist only as tribal knowledge with one or two people who know them
- No regular disaster recovery drills, so confidence in the plan is untested
What is in scope
- Business impact analysis to define RTO/RPO per system by criticality
- Backup strategy review and validation (frequency, retention, restore testing)
- Failover architecture design (multi-region, multi-AZ, or warm/cold standby)
- Automated failover and recovery runbook implementation
- Disaster recovery drill design and facilitation
- Documentation and ownership handover for ongoing DR maintenance
Who it is for
- Organizations with backups but no tested, documented recovery process
- Companies expanding into regulated industries that require documented business continuity plans
- Teams that experienced a near-miss outage and want a real plan before the next one
- Engineering leaders who can't currently answer 'how long would it take us to recover from a full region outage'
Prerequisites
- Stakeholder availability to define business impact and acceptable downtime per system
- Access to current backup and infrastructure configuration
- Agreement on a window for running a live or simulated recovery drill
- A named owner for maintaining the DR plan after handover
What you end up owning
Artifacts land in your repositories and cloud accounts, with documentation to match.
- Business impact analysis with RTO/RPO targets per critical system
- Backup and restore validation report with identified gaps
- Failover architecture design matched to defined recovery objectives
- Automated or semi-automated failover runbooks
- Disaster recovery drill plan and results from at least one facilitated drill
- Ongoing DR maintenance and testing cadence documentation
How the work is sequenced
Business Impact Analysis
Work with stakeholders to define acceptable recovery time and recovery point objectives per system, based on actual business impact.
Gap Assessment
Assess current backup, replication, and failover capability against the defined objectives to identify gaps.
Architecture & Runbook Design
Design the failover architecture and recovery runbooks needed to close identified gaps.
Implementation
Implement backup, replication, and failover automation matched to each system's criticality tier.
Drill & Handover
Run a facilitated recovery drill to validate the plan under realistic conditions, then hand over documentation and a testing cadence.
What we typically use
Backup & Replication
Failover Architecture
Automation
Monitoring
What changes when this is done
Qualitative outcomes only. Any figures depend entirely on your estate, and we will not quote them before measuring.
- Documented, validated RTO/RPO targets instead of assumptions
- Confidence that backups actually restore, because they've been tested
- A failover plan that's been executed in a drill, not just written down
- Reduced dependency on specific individuals holding recovery knowledge
- A recurring testing cadence that keeps the plan valid as systems change
Common questions
Related service
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Infrastructure Automation & IaC
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Talk to the engineers who would do the work
Bring your current architecture, constraints and the problem you are trying to solve. We will tell you what we would change first, what it depends on, and where we would start.