Engagement 09 · Resilience
A DR strategy you can actually fall back on. Defined RTO and RPO, an architecture matched to your business risk, runbooks for the worst day, and a tested failover so you know it works before you need it.
Why this exists
Most teams have backups. Far fewer have ever tested restoring them. Even fewer have a documented RTO and RPO that the business has signed off on. When the regional outage or the ransomware event happens, the difference between a bad day and a company-ending event is whether someone has done this work calmly, in advance. The DR engagement does that work properly.
What's included
Workload-by-workload criticality, downtime cost, data loss tolerance, and dependency mapping. The basis for every other decision.
Recovery time and recovery point objectives agreed with stakeholders, per workload tier. Not aspirational — what you'll actually commit to and pay for.
Multi-region, multi-zone, or backup-and-restore — chosen for each workload tier based on RTO/RPO. Networking, identity, data, and application layers covered.
Azure Backup, geo-replication, and Site Recovery configured and validated. Retention aligned to compliance, restore tested for real.
Failover and failback procedures. Detection criteria, decision rights, communication plan, and step-by-step actions. Written for someone running on caffeine at 3am.
Tabletop exercise with stakeholders, then a real failover of at least one workload to validate the plan. Findings folded back into runbooks.
Deliverables
Timeline
BIA workshops with stakeholders, dependency mapping, current state of backups and replication.
Architecture per tier, configuration changes (where in scope), runbooks written.
Tabletop with stakeholders, real failover of a non-critical workload, findings folded back.
FAQ
Do we need multi-region for everything?
No. Multi-region DR is expensive and most workloads don't need it. Many can run with availability zones plus restore-from-backup. The BIA tells us where the multi-region cost is justified and where it isn't.
We use Azure Site Recovery — is that enough?
ASR is one tool, not a strategy. Without RTO/RPO, runbooks, and a tested failover, ASR alone won't help on the day. We'll integrate ASR where it fits and replace it where it doesn't.
What if compliance requires DR but we don't really need it?
Common scenario. We design to meet the requirement at the lowest sustainable cost — sometimes a documented backup strategy with regular restore tests is the right answer, sometimes more. We'll be straight about the trade-offs.
Do you implement everything, or just design?
Design and runbooks are always included. Implementation depth depends on scope — some workloads will be configured fully, others left as a roadmap for your team or a follow-on engagement. Agreed up front.
How often should we re-test?
Annual at minimum, semi-annual for the most critical workloads. The runbook includes the test cadence and is part of the operating rhythm under Ongoing Platform Support if you'd rather not run it yourself.
Next step
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll talk through your workloads, compliance drivers, and current state before agreeing scope.
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