Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
A disaster recovery plan is a written, rehearsed answer to a total failure — a deleted database, a ransomware incident, an entire region going down — covering how much you can afford to lose and who acts.
What a Continuity Plan Actually Has to Answer
- Which systems come back online first, and in what order, when everything is down at once
- How a failover is actually triggered, and by whom, rather than left to whoever notices first
- How much data loss and downtime is acceptable for each system, stated in plain numbers
- Who is authorised to declare an incident and commit the business to the recovery route
Setting the Targets and the Standby Route
Recovery Point and Recovery Time Targets
How much data loss and how much downtime is acceptable, agreed system by system rather than as a single blanket figure.
A Standby Environment
A separate environment, kept ready to take over, sized to the recovery targets rather than duplicating everything at full cost.
Writing It Down and Proving It Works
A Documented Recovery Procedure
Written steps covering who declares an incident, who acts, and in what order, so a crisis follows a procedure rather than improvisation.
A Live Failover Rehearsal
The recovery route exercised for real on a chosen date, with the actual recovery time recorded against the target.
What Corporate Customers and Auditors Actually Ask For
A tender questionnaire or an auditor rarely asks whether you have a standby server; they ask for the recovery targets, the documented procedure and evidence it has been rehearsed. That is the set of documents this engagement produces, in a form you can hand over directly.
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from backup and restoration testing?
Backup testing proves you can recover data after a mistake or a failed disk. Continuity planning covers a larger scenario — an entire environment or region unavailable — and includes the decision-making process, the standby infrastructure and the order of recovery, not only the data.
Do we actually need a written plan, or is a standby server enough?
A standby server without a written procedure still leaves the hardest part unanswered: who decides to fail over, in what order systems come back, and what a customer or auditor is told in the meantime. The document is often what a corporate customer or regulator is actually asking for.
What drives the cost of building this?
How many systems are in scope, how strict the recovery targets are for each, and whether a standby environment already exists or must be built from nothing. A near-zero data loss target for every system costs far more to support than a plan that accepts a few hours of loss for less critical systems.
What drives the timeline for building a recovery plan?
Agreeing recovery targets with the people who understand what each system is worth to the business usually takes longer than building the standby environment itself, since it forces a real conversation about acceptable loss.
Will a live failover rehearsal risk our production system?
It is scheduled and scoped so production stays live throughout, typically by failing over a standby copy rather than the live system, or by rehearsing during a chosen low-traffic window with a defined way to reverse it.
Who ends up holding the plan and the drill records?
You do. The recovery procedure, standby environment and rehearsal records are handed over as documents you can produce for a customer, an auditor or a tender, without needing us in the room.
What do you need from us to define recovery targets?
A list of systems and what depends on them, one person authorised to define acceptable data loss and downtime for each, and availability for the people who need to take part in a live rehearsal.
Tell us what you need.
Send a short brief and one of our engineers will come back to you — usually the same day.
- No obligation
- We reply the same working day
- Your details stay private