Disaster recovery and business continuity planning: what happens when it is not a server that fails, but a site.
This is documentation and implementation together. Recovery objectives defined with the business, a secondary site designed and built, failover procedures written down in language someone can follow under pressure, and drills run periodically to prove the plan survives contact with reality.
For regulated institutions this is frequently a compliance requirement rather than a best practice — and the plan is examined, not just its existence.
Who it’s for
Institutions for whom extended unavailability is a regulatory or existential problem.
- Banks, insurers and financial institutions with continuity obligations
- Organisations designated as critical infrastructure or operating under sector continuity rules
- Businesses whose continuity plan exists as a document nobody has tested
- Organisations opening a second site and wanting it to serve a recovery purpose
What we deliver
A recovery capability that has been exercised, and documentation that reflects what actually happens.
Business impact analysis
Which systems matter, in what order, and what the cost of unavailability actually is — agreed with the business, not assumed by IT.
RTO and RPO definition
Per-system recovery time and recovery point objectives, signed off by the people accountable for them.
DR site design
Secondary site architecture — a second data centre or another location you control. Public cloud is not required and, where sovereignty is a concern, not recommended.
Replication and standby build
Database and system replication to the recovery site, sized to meet the agreed recovery point.
Failover procedures
Written, step-by-step procedures including decision authority — who declares a disaster, and who they need permission from.
Continuity planning
The non-technical half: communications, staff, premises and supplier dependencies.
DR drills
Periodic exercises, timed and documented, with findings fed back into the plan.
Audit evidence
Documentation packaged for examination by internal audit or your regulator.
How it connects to the rest of your stack
Nothing we deploy is meant to stand alone. These are the joins we build as part of the same engagement.
- Backup and recovery — The backup regime is the substrate the DR plan runs on; the two are designed together.
- High availability — Clustering covers component failure, DR covers site loss. Designing them separately is how organisations end up paying twice for partial cover.
- Monitoring — Replication health to the recovery site is monitored continuously, so the standby is known to be current.
- Project governance — DR implementation is run as a governed project, which is also what produces the audit trail the plan will be assessed against.