Architecture Pattern
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity
A deliberate plan for what happens when infrastructure fails outright — not the same question as day-to-day monitoring, and usually the one businesses discover they never answered until it's too late.
What it is
Disaster recovery is the technical plan (backups, failover infrastructure, restoration procedures) for getting systems back up after a serious failure — a data center outage, a corrupted database, a ransomware event. Business continuity is the broader plan for how the business keeps operating while that recovery happens. The two are related but distinct: DR gets the system back; continuity keeps the business running in the meantime.
When to use it
For any system where downtime or data loss has a real, named business cost — customer-facing applications, financial records, anything with a compliance-driven retention requirement. Not every internal tool needs a formal DR plan; the cost of building one should be weighed against the actual cost of that system being down.
Real tradeoffs
- —A DR plan that's never been tested is a false sense of security — 'we have backups' isn't the same as 'we've verified we can actually restore from them within an acceptable timeframe'
- —Recovery Time Objective (how long you can be down) and Recovery Point Objective (how much data you can afford to lose) drive real cost — tighter targets mean more expensive, more redundant infrastructure
- —Over-engineering DR for a low-stakes internal tool wastes budget that would matter more spent on the systems that actually carry business risk
Related
FAQs
Do we actually need a formal DR plan, or are backups enough?
Backups are a component, not a plan — a real DR plan defines how fast you need to be back up (RTO), how much data loss is acceptable (RPO), and includes an actually-tested restoration procedure. Whether it needs to be formal depends on what that system's downtime would cost you.
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