Designing to Survive: Continuity and Recovery
Faraday's read: most continuity plans are fiction until the day they are tested, and far too many are never tested at all. The two numbers that actually govern your fate — how long you can be down, and how much data you can afford to lose — are business decisions dressed up as technical ones, and pretending otherwise is how organizations end up with a plan that protects the wrong things at great expense. A recovery plan that lives in a binder is not a plan. It is a comforting story. The only version that counts is the one you have rehearsed until it is boring, because boredom, in this discipline, is the sound of resilience working exactly as designed.
Knowledge check
What is the practical difference between an organization's Recovery Time Objective and its Recovery Point Objective, and why must both be set by the business rather than by engineers alone?
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Recovery Time Objective is the maximum acceptable duration of downtime; Recovery Point Objective is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. Both are business decisions because they trade cost against risk — tighter objectives cost more — and only the business can weigh what an hour of downtime or an hour of lost data is actually worth.