Business Continuity Strategies and Solution Design
From requirements to options
Strategy selection translates BIA outputs into cost-justified solutions. Candidates should know the main strategy families and their trade-offs:
- Data: backups, replication (synchronous vs asynchronous), journaling, snapshots. Synchronous replication minimizes RPO but adds latency and cost.
- Systems: high availability clustering, failover, cloud multi-zone or multi-region, manual workarounds.
- Work area: dedicated alternate site, reciprocal agreement, work-from-home, mobile recovery, hot/warm/cold site.
- People and suppliers: cross-training, succession depth, alternate suppliers, buffer inventory, dual sourcing.
- Communications: mass notification, call trees, conferencing, status portals.
Strategy selection requires a cost-benefit analysis and a documented solution design that maps each strategy to the requirements it satisfies. Consider interdependencies: alternate sites need network, identity, and telephony, not just desks. Also consider regulatory and contractual obligations, and whether a strategy creates new single points of failure.
Traps
- Choosing a hot site by default without checking whether the RTO justifies the cost.
- Assuming work-from-home is free; it depends on endpoint capacity, bandwidth, and security controls.
- Ignoring the recovery of manual workarounds, which often need staffing and training to be viable.
- Selecting strategies without confirming that dependencies (network, authentication, telephony) are also recovered.
Rule of thumb
Match the strategy to the requirement, not to the budget alone: the cheapest option that reliably meets RTO, RPO, and MBCO within risk tolerance wins, and the rationale is documented.
Worked example
A payroll process has an MTD of 72 hours and an RPO of 24 hours. A warm site with nightly backups and remote access satisfies both at moderate cost; a hot site with synchronous replication is rejected as over-engineered, and the decision rationale is recorded.