The Sequence
Objectives first, architecture second
The most common continuity mistake in a court is buying redundancy before anyone has said, in business terms, how much data loss and how much downtime is acceptable. Those two numbers determine everything else, and only the court can set them.
01
State the recovery objectives in business terms
How much data may be lost, and how long may the court be down, on a receipting day and on a quiet day? Express it in hours and transactions, not in technology.
02
Design backup and protected storage to meet them
Scheduled automatic backups, encryption in transfer and storage, versioning for point-in-time restoration, and geographic separation where the objective requires it.
03
Add redundancy only where an objective demands it
Multi-Availability-Zone architecture, replication, clustering and failover each remove a specific single point of failure at a specific cost. Buy the ones your objectives justify.
04
Write the runbook, then exercise it
Decision rights, dependencies, fallback procedures and communications. A recovery plan becomes a capability only after the restore, the decision path and the communications have been exercised.
The only test that counts
A backup proves that data was written. Only a completed restore proves the data is usable.
What we provide
Planning, operation and the annual exercise
Backup and recovery design
On-site, cloud-based and hybrid backup options; scheduled automatic backups; incremental and differential strategies; encryption in transfer and at rest; versioning and geographic redundancy.
Continuity planning
Recovery objectives, dependency mapping, failover design, virtualized recovery options and documented decision rights.
The recovery exercise
An annual recovery exercise support role, available with advance coordination — a rehearsed restore against your documented objectives, with the result written down.
Monitoring and reporting
Continual monitoring of backup systems and regular testing, with reporting that shows whether the last restore actually succeeded.
Who leads
On premises, the jurisdiction leads the continuity plan and we support the application. In hosted environments, DBCC and AWS can take on more of the platform work. In either case, the split is identified ahead of time.