The Art of CTO Business Continuity Planner assesses business continuity and disaster recovery maturity across eight ISO 22301 areas — governance, business impact analysis, risk assessment, continuity plans, disaster recovery, crisis management, testing and training — returning a score per area and a prioritised gap list.
Would we survive a serious outage?
A continuity maturity score across governance, recovery and drills.
About 15 min · Assessment · Free
About this toolWhy it matters, common mistakes, FAQ
Would You Survive A Serious Outage?
Continuity plans are written for auditors and tested by reality. The gap between the documented recovery time and the achievable one is only discovered when it matters, and it is always larger than the document says.
Recovery objectives are set as targets rather than measured as capabilities. An untested RTO is a hope with a number attached, and the restore path is where the surprises live.
Questions CTOs ask
- What is the difference between RTO and RPO?
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the maximum acceptable time to restore service after a disruption — how long can you be down. RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time — how much data can you afford to lose. For example, an RTO of 4 hours means you must restore service within 4 hours, while an RPO of 1 hour means you can lose at most 1 hour of data. These targets directly determine your infrastructure requirements: shorter RTO/RPO demands more expensive redundancy and replication.
- How often should disaster recovery plans be tested?
- DR plans should be tested at least annually through full failover exercises, with tabletop exercises quarterly. Critical systems warrant more frequent testing — monthly automated failover tests for database replication and backup restoration. After every significant infrastructure change, validate that DR procedures still work. The most common failure mode is untested DR plans that fail during actual incidents due to configuration drift, credential expiration, or process changes that were not reflected in the documentation.
Related Reading
Business Continuity Planner guide: a business continuity plan template that maps RTO, RPO, and real failover work
Business Continuity Planner guide: business continuity plan template for RTO, RPO, and BIA
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