Cloud & Security — 03
When systems fail, the plan should already exist
Hardware dies, regions go down, ransomware encrypts, people delete the wrong thing. Xolkit designs recovery architecture and continuity plans with hard numbers attached — how much data you can lose, how fast you're back — and then rehearses them until they're real.
The business problem
Untested recovery is a story, not a capability
Most organizations have backups. Far fewer have ever restored from them under pressure, know how long a full recovery takes, or have decided which systems must come back first when everything is down at once.
The gap shows up at the worst moment: backups that quietly stopped months ago, restores that take days instead of hours, ransomware that encrypted the backups too, and staff improvising order-of-operations during an outage that's costing money by the minute.
The Xolkit approach
How we take this on
We start from business tolerance — how much downtime and data loss each process can survive — and engineer backward to architecture, runbooks, and rehearsals that meet those numbers.
Impact analysis
Each system gets an owner, a recovery time objective, and a recovery point objective grounded in business cost, not IT convenience.
Recovery architecture
Backup design, replication, and standby capacity engineered to meet the objectives — including ransomware-resistant immutable copies.
Runbooks and dependencies
Step-by-step recovery procedures with system ordering, credentials access, and communication templates.
Exercises and evidence
Scheduled restore tests and failover drills that measure actual recovery times and feed improvements back in.
Capabilities included
What this service covers
Business impact analysis
Structured RTO/RPO definition per system, with the cost trade-offs made explicit for leadership sign-off.
Backup architecture
Immutable, offsite, and versioned backup design following 3-2-1 principles — engineered against ransomware, not just hardware failure.
Failover and replication
Warm standbys, cross-region replication, or rapid-rebuild automation matched to each system's objectives and budget.
Continuity planning
Beyond IT: how the business operates during the outage — communications, manual fallbacks, and decision authority.
Recovery exercises
Restore tests, failover drills, and scenario tabletops with measured results and honest findings.
Ransomware recovery readiness
Isolated recovery paths, clean-room rebuild procedures, and backup integrity verification.
Typical deliverables
What you end up holding
- Business impact analysis with agreed RTO/RPO
- Resilient backup and replication architecture
- System-by-system recovery runbooks
- Continuity plan with communication templates
- Exercise reports with measured recovery times
- Quarterly test and review calendar
Technical considerations
The engineering behind the promise
Immutability against ransomware
Modern attacks target backups first. Object-lock storage, offline copies, and separated credentials keep at least one recovery path outside any attacker's reach.
Recovery time is an engineering budget
A four-hour RTO dictates architecture: restore bandwidth, standby capacity, automation depth. We design to the number instead of hoping the number emerges.
Dependencies decide the order
Applications rarely recover alone — identity, DNS, networks, and databases come first. Runbooks encode the dependency graph so recovery isn't archaeology.
Infrastructure as code as DR
Environments that rebuild from code turn 'replace the datacenter' from a procurement project into a pipeline run. DR strategy and platform engineering compound each other.
Engagement path
How an engagement unfolds
Phase 01
Resilience assessment
Current backup and recovery posture measured against what the business actually requires.
Phase 02
Architecture remediation
Gaps closed in priority order — immutability, coverage, replication, and automation.
Phase 03
Runbooks and rehearsal
Procedures written, then proven in a scheduled exercise with measured recovery times.
Phase 04
Sustained readiness
A standing test calendar and plan reviews as systems change — because DR decays without exercise.
Where this fits
Relevant industries and adjacent services
Industries where this applies
Often combined with
Cybersecurity
Security assessment, hardening, monitoring, and incident readiness — proportionate to your actual risk, built to enable the business rather than slow it.
View serviceInfrastructure
Design, hardening, and management of the server, network, and database layers your business runs on — cloud, on-premises, or hybrid.
View serviceCloud & DevOps
Cloud architecture, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD pipelines that turn deployment from a monthly event into a routine, reversible act.
View serviceCommon questions
Asked before most engagements
Something more specific? Ask directly — a straight answer costs nothing.
Ask a questionPossibly — three questions tell us quickly. Are the backups immutable or reachable with production credentials? Has a full restore been tested, and how long did it take? Do they cover SaaS data — your CRM, email, shared drives — or only servers? Most environments miss at least one, and any one of them is the whole ballgame during ransomware.
Start the conversation
Discuss Disaster Recovery for your business
Outline where you are and what's in the way. We'll respond with an honest read on approach, effort, and sequence.