Operational resilience & BC/DR

Recovery you have actually exercised

Guidance on Availability and Resilience Engeneering. Collaborated with IT leaders from BCS to develop an ISO 22301, DORA and UK Cyber Security Resilience Bill aligned IT leadership guidebook, covering From Important Business Services and Impact Tolerances through to live failover testing : resilience and recovery as an evidenced capability, not a paper artefact.

Discuss your resilience posture See case studies

ISO 22301 · ISO 27001DORA alignedBCI 6-element lifecycle

📘 Co-authored with BCS IT Leaders Forum Guidebook in Engineering Resilience for IT Systems — Download PDF ↗

Approach

Anticipate · Absorb · Recover · Adapt

The four-stage UK Government resilience model — operationalised through a Planning → Mapping → Monitoring → Prevention engineering lifecycle.

1. Anticipate

Threat horizon, scenario library, dependency mapping, supply-chain & third-party risk; FMEA-driven failure-mode analysis across all OSI layers.

2. Absorb

System compartmentalisation, graceful degradation, Zero Trust micro-segmentation, predictive telemetry to localise failure impact.

3. Recover

Recovery architecture, runbooks, controlled failover, data integrity validation, communication trees — exercised live, not theoretical.

4. Adapt

Blameless post-mortems, lessons-learned cycles, recovery-artefact updates, resilience-maturity uplift across successive operational cycles.

What we deliver

The full resilience stack — design through to evidenced recovery

Important Business Services & Impact Tolerance definition
Business Impact Assessment (BIA), RTO/RPO discipline
Recovery architecture & controlled failover models (incl. VDI/softphone for command-environment portability)
Three-lines-of-defence governance & programme board reporting
Tabletop, functional and full failover exercises
Spine-and-Leaf network architecture, NGFW, Zero Trust, Secure-by-Design
Supply-chain procurement, vendor lifecycle management & third-party risk management aligned to UK CSR Bill

Evidence

Resilience programmes already delivered

99.995%

Sustained uptime through 6→4 data-centre consolidation, 15% OPEX saved

100%

Uptime on the FIFA World Cup 2022 National Health Incident Command Centre

24h

Live operation from secondary site during planned controlled failover

£16M

Infrastructure modernisation programme — 999/111-class services

DR testing in practice

Real failover, real load, real evidence

We design DR tests that prove end-to-end recoverability — people, process, technology and suppliers. Pre-checks: backup verification, data integrity, infrastructure health and cross-team coordination with HICT and operational control rooms. Then a controlled failover, 24-hour live operation from the secondary, and a planned failback.

Automated Recovery Testing (ART) & Chaos Engineering principles
Degraded Mode Operating Procedures (DMOP) validation
Blameless post-mortem & CMDB / Logical Architecture updates

Plan a DR test