Episode 22 — Build Contingency and Disaster Recovery
In Episode Twenty-Two, titled “Build Contingency and Disaster Recovery,” we start with a simple promise: outages should become manageable, reversible events rather than existential crises. Contingency planning and Disaster Recovery (D R) are not about predicting every failure but about shaping systems, processes, and decisions so that disruption bends without breaking the mission. When continuity is architected deliberately, the organization absorbs shocks, restores services in an orderly sequence, and communicates clearly along the way. That confidence does not come from slogans; it comes from tested objectives, credible backups, disciplined failover patterns, and people who know what to do because they have rehearsed it.
Backups are only as good as their restoration paths, so the strategy must specify frequency, retention, isolation, and testing with a level of detail that survives an audit and a bad day. Frequency aligns to R P O, with high-change systems captured more often and low-change archives captured less. Retention ties to legal, regulatory, and operational needs, separating short-term recovery sets from long-term preservation in storage tiers that fit cost and retrieval expectations. Isolation prevents a single blast radius—malware, deletion, or sabotage—from corrupting every copy, which is why an offline or logically immutable tier matters. Most importantly, restoration testing is routine, scheduled, and measured, with records that show what was restored, how long it took, who verified integrity, and what failed so it can be fixed. A backup without a rehearsal is a story, not a safeguard.
Failover patterns provide the mechanical shape of resilience, and each choice carries cost and complexity tradeoffs. Active-active delivers the fastest recovery by running multiple instances simultaneously, distributing traffic while keeping data consistent enough to meet tight R P O values; the price is higher spend and careful conflict resolution. Warm standby maintains a partially running secondary with data replication and pre-provisioned capacity, enabling restoration in minutes to hours when an event occurs; it balances speed with manageable overhead. Cold standby leans on infrastructure-as-code or images to build capacity on demand from backups when a failure strikes; it is the least expensive to sit idle and the slowest to return to service. The right pattern varies by system, but the plan must tie each critical function to a deliberate pattern, with replication settings, cutover steps, and rollback cues spelled out.
Critical suppliers are part of the recovery fabric, so they must be mapped with the same rigor as internal components. This mapping names the services that support each function—cloud regions, identity platforms, payment gateways, message brokers, content delivery providers—and records the contacts, contract identifiers, support commitments, and known escalation paths. Alternate service options should be explored and, where feasible, pre-negotiated for dire scenarios, even if the intended path is to remain with a single strategic provider. The plan should also define evidence exchange during an incident, such as how logs, status updates, and change advisories will flow from the supplier to the response team without delay. When the outage involves a shared responsibility model, the lines between provider actions and customer actions must be explicit long before the dust starts to fly.
Communication during disruption is not improvisational theater; it is a practiced discipline with templates, review paths, and timelines. The plan includes pre-approved language for customer notices, regulator updates, partner advisories, agency coordination, and media statements, each tuned to clarity and honesty without speculation. These templates specify what is known, what is being done, which services are affected, and when the next update will arrive, with a single authoritative channel to prevent conflicting versions. Internally, executives receive concise situation reports that connect technical realities to business impacts and choices. Good communication calms stakeholders, aligns effort, and reduces rumor-driven churn that otherwise distracts responders. By setting this rhythm in advance, the organization speaks with one voice when the lights flicker.
One predictable pitfall is discovering that backups are unrecoverable because the decryption keys, versions, or agents necessary to read them are missing, expired, or incompatible. This failure often appears when encryption keys were tied to a compromised system, when backup software was upgraded without converting legacy sets, or when restore permissions were never delegated to the people on call. The plan counters this hazard by separating key management from backup hosts, documenting recovery of keys, retaining compatible readers for legacy formats, and testing restores across software versions and platforms. It also assigns clear custodians for keys and access, with a break-glass process that is auditable and time-bounded. The fix is not exotic; it is disciplined housekeeping aligned to the worst day.
A high-leverage improvement—often the fastest quick win—is to automate offsite, immutable backups and produce verification reports that leaders actually read. Offsite means a distinct trust boundary, ideally across providers or accounts, while immutability prevents alteration for a defined retention period so ransomware cannot rewrite history. Verification means each job is checked for completeness, integrity hashes are validated, and periodic sampled restores confirm that data is usable and application-consistent. These reports should be short and comparative, showing trends, failures, and exceptions with owners and due dates, so they drive action rather than become background noise. With this automation in place, the organization gains a constant heartbeat of recoverability instead of assuming that success will appear when called.
Keeping a simple recap handy helps executives and responders share the same mental map under pressure. Objectives define how fast to return and how much data to risk; backups provide the raw material for rebuilding; failover patterns shape the path by which services return; suppliers expand or constrain options; workarounds protect essential operations while systems catch up; and communications keep trust intact. When that sequence is rehearsed and tied to names, tools, and checkpoints, it turns confusion into choreography. People do not need a long speech; they need a shared vocabulary that maps to practiced steps and measurable outcomes.
A final word on resilience and what to do next. Contingency and Disaster Recovery (D R) succeed when they are built into architecture, governance, and culture rather than bolted on as a compliance afterthought. This chapter traced the path from Business Impact Analysis (B I A) to objectives, backups, failover, supplier mapping, workarounds, communications, and testing, with a sober look at pitfalls and a practical quick win to raise the floor quickly. The immediate next action is concrete and time-boxed: schedule a restoration drill and a failover rehearsal for a priority service, measure the achieved Recovery Time Objective (R T O) and Recovery Point Objective (R P O), and publish the results with owners for any gaps. When that rhythm takes hold, outages stop being career-defining surprises and become planned detours that the organization navigates with poise.
