Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

Most businesses assume they could recover from a disaster. Very few have tested that assumption.

Backup software running in the background is not a recovery plan. It's a prerequisite for one. The difference between a firm that survives a ransomware attack, a server failure, or a facility outage and one that doesn't rarely comes down to whether backups existed — it comes down to whether anyone had ever actually practiced recovering from them, how long recovery takes, and whether the people responsible knew what to do without scrambling to figure it out under pressure.

A disaster recovery plan is a documented, tested procedure that answers specific questions before the crisis happens: What systems need to come back first? How long can we operate without them? Where does the work go if the office is inaccessible? Who calls whom and in what order? What do we tell clients?

We build that plan for your environment — specific to your systems, your workflows, your compliance obligations, and your actual tolerance for downtime — and we test it so you know it works before you need it.

What's covered

• Business impact analysis — identifying your critical systems, workflows, and data, and documenting the operational and compliance consequences of losing access to each
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) definition based on your actual business requirements
• Disaster recovery plan documentation covering system recovery procedures, communication protocols, client notification obligations, and escalation paths
• Backup architecture review and validation — confirming your backups are complete, current, encrypted, and stored in a way that survives the scenarios they need to survive
• Tabletop exercise facilitation — walking your team through a simulated incident to surface gaps before they matter
• Recovery testing with documented results — actual restore operations, not just confirmation that the backup process ran
• Annual plan review and update to reflect changes in your environment, your team, and your compliance obligations

This service is structured as a per-engagement engagement, typically scoped following your initial assessment when the gap between your current backup posture and a documented recovery program is identified. Ongoing plan maintenance is available as part of a broader retainer.

Why this matters for your compliance program

FTC Safeguards requires a documented incident response plan as part of your written information security program. HIPAA requires both a contingency plan and a disaster recovery plan as addressable implementation specifications — meaning you need a documented reason if you don't have them. Cyber insurers increasingly require evidence of tested recovery procedures before issuing or renewing policies.

Beyond the compliance requirement, a firm that can't tell clients how long recovery takes after an incident, or what data was affected, or what notification obligations apply — that firm has a serious problem. We make sure the plan exists, is tested, and is ready to execute when the question stops being hypothetical.