DR Onboarding: What to Expect
From resilience assessment to validated recovery: the implementation journey.
Overview
Implementing resilience engineering is not a one-week project. It's a phased process that starts with understanding your current posture, designing the target architecture, building the recovery capabilities, and validating them through drills.
Typical timeline: 6–12 weeks to initial recovery capability, with continuous improvement from there.
The Implementation Phases
Resilience Assessment Weeks 1–2
We audit your current infrastructure for single points of failure, backup coverage, replication gaps, and recovery procedures. Every workload gets a criticality tier and current RTO/RPO measurement. You get a resilience assessment and a prioritized gap list.
Architecture Design Weeks 3–4
Target recovery architecture designed for each workload tier. Replication topology, backup layers, failover triggers, and runbooks specified. Budget and timeline for implementation agreed with stakeholders.
Implementation Weeks 5–10
Replication configured, backup layers deployed, failover automation built, monitoring enhanced. Each component tested in isolation before integration. Runbooks written and reviewed.
Validation Drill Weeks 10–12
First full recovery drill. Controlled failover during a maintenance window. Recovery time measured, data integrity verified, gaps documented. This is the moment of truth, and the beginning of the continuous improvement cycle.
What You Need to Prepare
Infrastructure Access
Read-only access to your current environment for the resilience assessment. Scoped, logged implementation access is agreed during the architecture design phase.
Workload Inventory
A list of services, databases, and integrations with approximate criticality. Doesn't need to be perfect. The assessment will refine it.
Business Impact Data
Revenue per hour, SLA commitments, regulatory requirements. This drives the RTO/RPO targets and justifies the investment level for each tier.
Stakeholder Availability
A technical lead and a business owner available for the architecture design sessions and drill planning. 2–3 hours per week during implementation.