By Shivacha Engineering
Backups exist; recovery is assumed
Most organisations can say they have backups. Far fewer can say how long a full restore takes, whether the restored system actually works, or whether an attacker who compromised production could also delete the backups.
Start with objectives, per system
Recovery time objective (how long can this be down?) and recovery point objective (how much data can we lose?) should be set per system by business impact. A payment ledger and an internal wiki deserve very different investments.
- RTO and RPO agreed with business owners
- Tiers of systems with matching strategies
- Dependencies mapped so recovery order is known
Layer the protection
High availability across zones handles component failures. Cross-region replication handles regional outages. Immutable, isolated backups handle the worst case — including ransomware — because an attacker in production cannot reach them.
Automate the restore
Recovery environments defined as infrastructure as code can be created on demand, and restore procedures scripted so they do not depend on the one person who remembers how. Runbooks cover the parts that cannot be automated.
Rehearse, record, improve
Scheduled recovery drills turn assumptions into evidence. Each drill should produce a short report: what worked, how long it took against objectives, what to fix. Over time, recovery becomes routine — which is exactly what you want when it is no longer a drill.
