Continuity and Recovery Strategies
Options to keep the business running
Designing the continuity strategy means choosing, consciously and with justification, how the organization will keep each critical process running during a disruption, whether through active redundancy where a secondary system runs in parallel all the time, temporary manual procedures when technology fails, or agreements with third parties that absorb part of the operation. There's no single right strategy for every process, and the most common mistake is applying the same costly solution to processes with different levels of criticality or, worse, having no defined strategy for processes that do need one. Weighing the cost of each option against the cost of the disruption is what makes it possible to reach a reasonable decision instead of one based on intuition. A practical example is keeping a documented manual procedure for processing orders on paper during a sales system outage, while the digital platform is restored.