Business Continuity & DR Program Management
Plans, tests and evidences recovery.
Overview
Distinct from backup technology: this is the programme that decides what must recover, how fast, in what order, and proves it. Business impact analysis sets RTO and RPO per process; dependency mapping shows what each process needs; plans are maintained against that; exercises test them; and the results become evidence. DORA, NIS2 and ISO 22301 have all pushed this from a binder into a supervised obligation, and the market has consolidated hard — Riskonnect absorbed Castellan, and the legacy GRC suites now compete with resilience-native platforms.
Backups without a tested, owned recovery plan is the most common gap between "we have DR" and actually recovering.
Advantages
- A business impact analysis is the only defensible way to set recovery priorities
- Dependency mapping exposes the single points of failure no single team can see
- Declared versus tested RTO and RPO is the distinction regulators now probe directly
- Plan maintenance workflows stop documents rotting between annual reviews
- Exercise results become the evidence DORA and ISO 22301 assessors ask for
Trade-offs
- BIA exercises are labour-intensive and go stale as the business changes
- Plans are written for audits rather than for use, and it shows during an actual event
- Enterprise BCM suites are expensive relative to how often they are opened
- Dependency data quality depends on a CMDB that is usually incomplete
- A tested RTO on paper still assumes people, and people are the part never tested
Open-source option
No open-source BCM programme platform exists. The technical recovery layer has excellent open tooling — Restic, Velero, Bareos — but business impact analysis, dependency mapping, plan lifecycle and exercise evidence have no free equivalent, and are usually run in spreadsheets and a document store when the budget is not there.
Vendors & tools in this area
Recovery objectives and drill results as evidenced records.
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