Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
The authority hub for business continuity and disaster recovery — backup strategy, RPO/RTO, recovery testing, ransomware recovery, and high availability.
Tools
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Tools
Free, client-side tools — nothing is transmitted or stored.
Business Continuity Assessment
Evaluate business continuity planning maturity — scope, roles, communication plans, and recovery procedures.
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Disaster Recovery Readiness Assessment
Evaluate disaster recovery capability — failover procedures, documented RPO/RTO, and DR plan currency.
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Backup Strategy Planner
Generate a tailored backup strategy recommendation based on data criticality, recovery requirements, and current coverage.
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RPO/RTO Calculator
Calculate realistic Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives based on business impact and technical constraints.
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Backup Retention Planner
Generate a tailored backup retention schedule based on data type, compliance requirements, and storage cost tradeoffs.
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Backup & Operational Continuity Assessment
Guided assessment of backup coverage, recovery readiness, and disaster recovery governance across 27 operational checkpoints.
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Downloads
Downloadable Resources
Free templates and guides — preview, copy, or download as Markdown or plain text.
Template
Business Continuity Plan Template
A structured template for documenting critical business functions, recovery priorities, roles, and communication procedures during a disruption.
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Template
Disaster Recovery Plan Template
A technical DR plan document structure covering systems inventory, RPO/RTO, failover procedures, recovery infrastructure, and post-recovery validation.
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Checklist
Backup Testing Checklist
A checklist for scheduling, executing, and documenting backup restoration tests to confirm backups are actually recoverable.
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Template
Recovery Runbook Template
A step-by-step technical runbook structure for recovering a specific system, from pre-recovery checks through verification and rollback.
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Checklist
Incident Response Checklist
A checklist organized by incident response phase — Detection, Containment, Eradication, Recovery, and Post-Incident Review.
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Worksheet
Backup Strategy Worksheet
A worksheet for planning backup strategy by data criticality tier, applying the 3-2-1 rule, and setting retention periods.
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Foundations
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
What each discipline actually covers, and how they relate.
Business Continuity Planning Fundamentals
What business continuity planning actually covers, the core components of a BCP, and why most continuity plans fail at the exact moment they're needed.
Beginner
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Disaster Recovery Explained
What disaster recovery actually restores, its core technical components, and how it relates to backup — plus the mistake of conflating having backups with having DR.
Beginner
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Backup Strategy
Backup Strategy, RPO/RTO, and Testing
How to design a backup strategy around actual recovery requirements, and prove it works.
Backup Strategy Guide: The 3-2-1 Rule and Beyond
The 3-2-1 backup rule, its modern extension toward immutability, backup type tradeoffs, and how to design a backup strategy around actual recovery requirements.
Intermediate
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RPO vs. RTO Explained
What Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective actually measure, how they drive architecture and cost decisions, and how to set them realistically.
Intermediate
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Backup Testing Best Practices
Why a backup that has never been restored is a hypothesis, not a safeguard, and how to build a recurring, low-friction testing cadence that actually proves recoverability.
Intermediate
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Recovery Planning
Disaster Recovery and Ransomware Recovery Planning
Disaster Recovery Planning
How to build a disaster recovery plan that actually gets used during a real event — specific failover procedures, named roles, a real communication plan, and a defined owner.
Intermediate
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Ransomware Recovery Planning
Why ransomware recovery has requirements that go beyond generic disaster recovery — immutable backups, isolated restore environments, known-clean restore points, and why paying the ransom shouldn't be the default posture.
Advanced
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Quick Reference
The Short Version
Full treatment lives in the articles above.
Business Continuity ≠ Disaster Recovery
Business continuity covers the whole business — people, processes, vendors, facilities. Disaster recovery is the IT-specific subset: restoring systems, applications, and data.
An Untested Backup Is a Hypothesis
A backup job that "completed successfully" says nothing about whether the data is actually restorable — only an actual, verified restore test proves that.
RPO and RTO Are Cost Decisions, Not Just Technical Ones
A near-zero RPO/RTO requires expensive continuous replication and hot-standby infrastructure. Setting these targets realistically means weighing actual business impact against actual cost.
Ransomware Targets Backups Directly
Modern ransomware specifically seeks out and destroys accessible backups before encrypting production — immutable, offline copies are what actually make recovery possible without paying.
FAQ
Common Questions
How does this cluster relate to Compliance & Governance?
Backup immutability, tested recovery, and documented incident response are specific controls required by HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, cyber insurance applications, and most other frameworks in that cluster. This cluster explains how to actually build and test those capabilities; the Compliance & Governance cluster explains which framework requires what.
Do we need a disaster recovery plan if we already have backups?
Backups are a necessary but not sufficient component of disaster recovery. Having backups doesn't mean you have a tested, timely, documented way to actually restore operations from them — see Disaster Recovery Explained for the distinction.
How much should we invest in high availability versus disaster recovery?
This is driven by your actual RPO/RTO requirements per system, not a blanket "as available as possible" goal. Use the RPO/RTO Calculator to identify which systems genuinely need HA-level investment and which can be met more cost-effectively with DR-level recovery.
Operational Support
Need help building an actual, tested recovery capability?
IT KORR can design backup strategy, build and test disaster recovery plans, and help you set realistic RPO/RTO targets matched to your actual business impact.
No commitment required — we respond within one business day.