Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan Development

We cannot promise any specific insurer's or auditor's acceptance, and you should distrust anyone who does. What we can say from doing this work: what carriers and auditors consistently ask for is a written plan that is current, has named owners, and has been exercised — and that is exactly what you receive, including the dated exercise report that answers the 'tested?' checkbox with evidence rather than a yes. If a particular questionnaire or framework is driving you, give it to us at kickoff and we write toward its evidence requirements.

Templates produce documents in which 'restore from backup' maps to no actual backup job and 'failover to the secondary site' describes a site that does not exist — and experienced reviewers spot boilerplate in minutes. The value here is not the document structure, it is the verification: every procedure in this plan points at a control we confirmed exists in your environment, and everything that does not exist is in the gap register where you can see and price it. A template cannot do that, because a template has never looked at your tenant.

You do — deliberately. Recovery targets are business decisions about money: how much downtime and how much data loss each tier can absorb before the cost becomes unacceptable. We bring the evidence (what an hour of downtime costs each tier, what your current controls can actually deliver, what tighter targets would cost to achieve) and propose numbers. Your leadership decides, and the plan records who decided — because 'IT picked four hours' impresses no auditor and holds up in no post-incident review.

A tabletop is a facilitated, scenario-driven walkthrough: the people named in the plan work through an escalating incident — built from your real topology — and make the decisions they would make on the day, while we capture what works and what breaks. It tests the human layer: authority, communication, sequence, assumptions. A real technical failover tests the infrastructure layer, and it belongs to the tooling engagements — our Azure Site Recovery implementation ends with exactly such a test. Mature programs do both; this engagement delivers the first and tells you precisely how to get the second.

The opposite — the plan is how you avoid buying the wrong tooling. It establishes which workloads actually matter, what targets they need, and what your current backups can genuinely deliver; the gap register then becomes a prioritized, costed shopping list instead of a vendor's guess. Buying replication before knowing your targets is how companies end up protecting the wrong servers to the wrong standard. Plan first, implement second — and we sell both in that order for a reason.

Activation criteria and who is authorized to declare a disaster; roles with named people and deputies; an escalation contact tree; per-tier recovery procedures mapped to the real controls behind them; communication templates for staff, customers, and where relevant regulators; interim workarounds to keep people productive during recovery; the RTO/RPO matrix with its sign-off record; the gap register; and the maintenance schedule. Delivered as editable working files — it is your plan, in formats you can maintain, not a locked PDF.

Roughly: a one-hour kickoff with the sponsor, 30-60 minutes with each key system or department owner during week one, a review pass on the draft, and about two hours together for the tabletop. Call it a working day in total, spread across two weeks, concentrated on the people who would run a real incident. The engagement is designed so we carry the writing load and your people carry only the decisions.

Yes. The inventory covers everything the business depends on — the line-of-business app on a vendor's cloud, the phone system, the payment processor — and the plan includes them with recovery procedures that reference your vendors' documented mechanisms and support paths. Our verification goes deepest on the Microsoft stack because that is what we can inspect and implement directly; for third-party systems we document honestly what the vendor commits to, which is itself frequently a revealing exercise.

It is structured to serve the continuity evidence that SOC 2 availability criteria, ISO 27001's continuity controls, NIST-aligned contingency-planning expectations, and cyber-insurance questionnaires consistently ask for. Alignment is not certification: if you are heading into a formal audit, our dedicated readiness assessments — ISO 27001, SOC, NIST CSF, or CMMC and NIST 800-171 — cover the full control landscape, and this plan slots into them as the continuity artifact.

Review it on every significant change — new critical system, restructure, key departure — and at least annually; re-exercise it annually as well, which is also the cadence insurer questionnaires increasingly assume. The plan ships with this schedule and a named owner written in, because an unowned plan decays silently. If you want the annual review and exercise run for you, we offer that as a separate arrangement — but the plan is deliberately built so you can do it yourselves.

Then the engagement has done its job while it is still cheap. Findings land in the exercise report and the gap register with options: relax the target knowingly, or close the gap with a concrete control — replication for the tier that needs minutes, better backup for the tier that needs days — each pointing to a separately quoted engagement you are free to take to us or to anyone. What we will not do is quietly rewrite the target so the paper looks clean. Better that a tabletop finds the truth than an outage does.

No — related discipline, different document. Incident response governs how you detect, investigate, and contain a security compromise; business continuity and disaster recovery govern how the business keeps operating and how systems are restored, whatever the cause — cyber, hardware, fire, or vendor failure. A ransomware event invokes both. This plan references your IR arrangements at the right junctions and covers the continuity side properly, rather than doing both halves badly in one binder.