Design redundancy, backup, and graceful degradation.
Test recovery rather than relying on documentation.
Business continuity asks how important functions continue during disruption. Recovery time objective (RTO) limits outage duration; recovery point objective (RPO) limits acceptable data loss. Redundancy helps only when failure domains, credentials, and dependencies are independent.
detect -> contain -> preserve integrity -> restore -> verify -> communicate
RTO: maximum downtime | RPO: maximum data loss
Backups need encryption, access control, immutability where appropriate, retention, and restore tests. Graceful degradation should preserve safe read-only or queued behavior without bypassing authorization.
Exercises
Set RTO and RPO for payroll, email, and public web content.
Design a restore test.
Identify shared dependencies that defeat redundancy.
Self-check
What is RTO?
What is RPO?
Why test backups?
Self-Check Quiz
1. Which objective concerns acceptable data loss?
AnswerRPO, the recovery point objective.
2. Does a second instance guarantee resilience?
AnswerNo. A shared region, identity system, network, or deployment failure can take both instances down.
Homework
Write a continuity plan for a critical enterprise service.
Define RTO, RPO, dependencies, and recovery evidence.
Include a security check after restoration.
Sample answerA plan names business owner, RTO/RPO, failover and restore steps, dependencies, contacts, communication, and evidence. After restore, verify identity, authorization, integrity, logs, secrets, configuration, and data freshness before reopening service.