Disaster recovery
A continuity plan that matches how your business actually runs
Business continuity consulting helps an organization decide what must keep running during a disruption, how fast each process has to come back, and who does what. Storcom consultants run the business impact analysis, set recovery objectives per application tier, write the BC/DR and incident response plans, and test them with tabletop exercises.
Last updated
Practice: Backup and disaster recovery
- Built for
- For leaders who need a continuity plan that holds up in an audit and a real outage.
- What you get
- Business impact analysis for critical processes
- Recovery objectives set per application tier
- Plans tested in facilitated tabletop exercises
- 20+ years of recovery experience
- Delivered from
- Geneva, Illinois, for Chicagoland and customers across the U.S.
Watch a failover
Lose the primary site and see what a tested runbook does next: systems come up in dependency order at the recovery site and users are reconnected.
Production running. Replication healthy.
- 1Primary site lost
- 2Failover started from the runbook
- 3Systems up in dependency order
- 4Users reconnected at the recovery site
Illustration only. Your recovery time is the RTO we design and test with you.
Can you answer yes to all of these?
If any of these gives you pause, your continuity program has gaps worth closing before an outage or an audit finds them.
- We know which business processes stop first in an outage, and what each hour of downtime costs.
- Every critical application has a written RTO and RPO that the business has signed off.
- Our recovery plan reflects the environment we run today, not the one we ran three years ago.
- People know their roles in an incident, including who declares a disaster and who talks to customers.
- We have rehearsed a ransomware scenario with leadership in the room.
- We could show an auditor or regulator evidence that the plan has been tested.
What the engagement covers
Business impact analysis (BIA)
We interview process owners to measure the operational, financial and regulatory impact of a disruption, rank processes by criticality, and identify the people, sites, suppliers and systems each one depends on.
Recovery objectives by tier
BIA results become an RTO and RPO for each application tier, so recovery spending follows business impact instead of guesswork.
BC/DR plan development
Actionable plans covering technology, facilities, workforce and third-party failures, written so the people on call can follow them during an event.
Incident response plan development
A plan for cyber incidents such as ransomware: detection and escalation, containment, communication, evidence handling, and the hand-off to recovery.
Tabletop exercises
Facilitated scenario walk-throughs with IT and business leaders that test decisions, roles and communication, and turn the gaps into a remediation list.
Standards gap analysis
A gap analysis of your program against an established framework, such as ISO 22301 or, for financial institutions, the FFIEC business continuity guidance.
BC plan, DR plan or incident response plan: which do you need?
Usually all three. Each covers a different part of a bad day, and each hands off to the next.
| Plan | Focus | Question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Business continuity plan | Keeping the business operating: people, facilities, suppliers, customers | How do we keep serving customers while systems or sites are down? |
| Disaster recovery plan | Restoring IT systems and data at a recovery site | In what order do applications come back, and how fast? |
| Incident response plan | Handling a security incident from detection to close | Who contains the threat, who decides, and who do we notify? |
We write the three plans so the hand-offs between them are explicit, not assumed.
How an engagement runs
Discover
Review your existing plans, interview stakeholders, and run the business impact analysis.
Design
Set recovery objectives per tier, choose recovery strategies, and agree the budget trade-offs with leadership.
Document
Write the BC/DR and incident response plans, with roles, contact trees and links to technical runbooks.
Exercise
Run a tabletop exercise, capture what broke, and update the plans. Then repeat on a schedule.
Frequently asked questions
What is a business impact analysis?
A business impact analysis (BIA) identifies your critical business processes and measures what happens when each one stops: lost revenue, regulatory exposure, customer impact and knock-on effects across operations. The result is a ranked list of processes with the recovery time each needs, which drives your recovery objectives and your spending.
What is a tabletop exercise?
A tabletop exercise is a facilitated discussion in which leaders and IT staff walk through a realistic scenario, such as ransomware or a site outage, step by step. Nobody touches production. It tests decisions, roles and communication, and it surfaces gaps in the plan before a real event does.
How is business continuity different from disaster recovery?
Disaster recovery restores IT systems and data. Business continuity is broader: it keeps the business operating through a disruption, including people, facilities, suppliers and customer communication. A good continuity plan includes the DR plan and says what the business does while IT recovers.
Do you develop incident response plans for ransomware?
Yes. We develop incident response plans that cover detection, escalation, containment, communication and recovery, and we tie them to your DR runbooks so the hand-off from the security response to the recovery team is clear. We then test the plan in a tabletop exercise.
Will the plan stand up to an audit or regulatory exam?
We can review your program against a framework such as ISO 22301 or the FFIEC business continuity guidance and close the gaps we find. You end up with documented plans, signed-off recovery objectives and exercise results, which are the records auditors and examiners typically ask to see.
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Start with a discovery call.
Tell us what you run today, what is changing and what worries you. We listen, ask questions and tell you plainly whether and how we can help. No cost, no commitment.