Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Designed and implemented business continuity and disaster recovery plans covering critical systems, data protection, and operational resilience.
Key Results
- Full DR coverage
- Recovery procedures documented and tested for all critical systems
- Defined RTO/RPO
- Clear recovery targets agreed with the business for every critical service
- Verified backups
- Automated backup testing replacing untested, assumed-good backups
- Tested plans
- Tabletop exercises validating recovery procedures with stakeholders
The Challenge
An e-commerce retailer had no formal business continuity or disaster recovery plans. Backups existed but were untested, recovery procedures were undocumented, and there was no analysis of which systems were critical or what downtime would cost the business.
Without DR planning, any significant outage would have resulted in extended downtime with no clear recovery path. Staff would not have known which systems to prioritise, how to restore from backups, or how to communicate with customers during an incident. The business was exposed to data loss and extended revenue loss from any serious disruption.
The Solution
Approach
Conducted a business impact analysis to identify critical systems, acceptable downtime windows (RTO), and data loss tolerances (RPO). Mapped dependencies between systems to understand cascade failure risks. Designed recovery strategies proportionate to each system's criticality.
Implementation
Built comprehensive DR documentation covering every critical system with step-by-step recovery procedures. Implemented automated backup verification and alerting. Established offsite backup replication for critical data. Ran tabletop exercises with IT and business stakeholders to validate the plans. Created a recurring testing schedule to keep documentation current.
The Results
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