Disaster Recovery (DR) planning is essential for maintaining IT service continuity, but the effectiveness of a DR plan depends on how well it anticipates real-world threats and how sensibly those threats are framed.
It is easy for organisations to fall into the trap of overcomplicating DR plans by trying to account for every conceivable threat. However, this can lead to over-detailed, inflexible, and quickly outdated plans that are difficult to navigate and execute when required.
Organisations should instead focus on creating DR plans that are practical and maintainable by:
- Focusing on Outcomes and Impact: Rather than detailing every possible failure, concentrate on the outcomes and impacts of disruptions. For example, consider what happens if users can’t access a critical system for several hours or if a primary data store is corrupted.
- Creating Generalised Scenarios: Focus your DR plans around broad, high-impact scenarios such as “loss of primary data centre” or “critical application unavailability.” This approach allows for flexible recovery strategies without needing to anticipate every micro-variation of failure.
- Prioritising Flexibility: Build flexibility into your DR strategy by establishing clear roles and escalation paths, automating recovery processes, and regularly testing your plans through scenario-based exercises.
- Aligning with Business Needs: Ensure that your DR plans are aligned with business impact assessments and the organisation’s risk appetite. This alignment helps in creating relevant and maintainable plans that are truly useful in a crisis.
By focusing on these principles, you can create DR plans that are effective without being overly complex, which can be very hard to plan for and costly to accommodate the appropriate resourcing and capabilities required.
The key threats to ICT Service Continuity
In our experience working with many customers on their DR plans and organisational resilience, we see some of the most common relevant threats as follows:
- Cybersecurity Incidents: Ransomware, DDoS attacks, and insider threats can cripple systems or compromise data integrity. Recovery must account for malicious intent, not just technical faults.
- Infrastructure Failures: Power outages, network disruptions, and hardware breakdowns remain common causes of service outages, especially in hybrid environments.
- Natural Disasters: Storms, floods, and fires can affect on-premises data centres and regional cloud services. Geographic redundancy and failover planning are essential.
- Human Error: Misconfigurations, accidental data deletion, or incorrect deployment scripts can cause widespread disruptions in even the most secure environments.
- Software Failures and Update Issues: Application bugs, failed patches, or compatibility issues can render core services inoperable.
- Third-Party Failures: Cloud service providers, ISPs, and key SaaS vendors can all experience outages, requiring DR strategies that don’t rely on a single point of failure.
Turning your threats into DR scenarios
While these threats are diverse, they will typically result in a limited set of ICT service interruptions and DR plans should be focused on the key scenarios that encapsulate these threats. For example:
- “Loss of primary data centre” (covers physical damage, power loss, regional disruption)
- “Critical application loss or unavailability” (covers malware, software failure, user error)
- “Widespread network outage or isolation” (covers DDoS, ISP failure, firewall misconfiguration)
- “Loss of key IT personnel” (covers insider threats, workforce disruption, knowledge silos)
- “Cloud service outage” (covers hyperscaler failure, configuration lockout, API issues)
These scenarios sit at the right level to inform practical planning: what to fail over, how to prioritise recovery steps, what tools to use, and who needs to respond. The goal isn’t perfect foresight—it’s operational readiness, and by focusing on these scenarios, organisations can prepare more flexible recovery strategies without needing to anticipate every micro-variation of a failure.
Flexibility in DR planning
A robust disaster recovery strategy assumes you can’t predict every detail in an incident. It builds in flexibility by:
- Establishing clear roles and escalation paths
- Automating recovery of critical services and data
- Using cloud-native and hybrid failover options
- Regularly testing via scenario-based exercises (including ransomware simulations)
- Aligning with business impact assessments and risk appetite
That is not to say that some DR responses will not require more detailed guidance, but these should be contained in specific playbooks and procedures and linked appropriately to your DR plan so that they are easily referenced when required.
In Summary
Threats to IT service continuity are evolving, but not infinite. By focusing on core disruption types and pitching recovery scenarios at a sensible level, organisations can build DR plans that are relevant, maintainable, and truly useful in a crisis.
At Business Aspect, we work with many customers on their Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans and capability improvements, leveraging over 20 years of consulting experience and knowledge. We promote a risk approach, ensuring plans are pragmatic and work for you and your organisation. If you would like to discuss how we might help you, please reach out to us.