Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Requirements

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Business Context & Criticality

Business type and industry? (financial, healthcare, e-commerce, manufacturing)
Application/system criticality levels? (mission-critical, business-critical, standard)
Revenue impact of downtime? (per hour, per day)
Regulatory requirements? (SOX, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, Basel III, industry-specific)
Compliance audit requirements?
Business continuity vs disaster recovery scope?

Recovery Objectives

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) by system tier? (minutes, hours, days)
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) by system tier? (seconds, minutes, hours)
Maximum tolerable downtime? (per incident, per year)
Data loss tolerance? (zero loss, minimal loss, acceptable loss)
Service level degradation acceptable during recovery?
Recovery priority order for different systems?

Current Infrastructure Assessment

Primary data center location and specifications?
Current backup strategy and tools?
Existing replication mechanisms?
Network connectivity and bandwidth?
Current cloud adoption level? (hybrid, cloud-first, on-premises)
Dependencies between systems and applications?

Disaster Scenarios & Risk Assessment

Natural disaster risks? (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, wildfires)
Technology failures? (hardware, software, network, power)
Human errors and operational risks?
Cyber security threats and data breaches?
Vendor/supplier failures?
Pandemic or workforce unavailability scenarios?

Geographic & Site Requirements

Primary site location and characteristics?
Secondary site requirements? (hot, warm, cold standby)
Geographic separation requirements? (miles, time zones, regions)
Multi-region deployment preferences?
Data residency and sovereignty requirements?
Cross-border data transfer restrictions?

Data Protection & Backup Strategy

Data types and classification? (critical, important, standard)
Backup frequency requirements? (continuous, hourly, daily, weekly)
Backup retention policies? (days, months, years)
Backup testing and validation frequency?
Point-in-time recovery requirements?
Cross-region data replication needs?

Testing & Validation

DR testing frequency? (monthly, quarterly, annually)
Testing scope? (full failover, partial, tabletop exercises)
Testing windows and business impact?
Success criteria for DR tests?
Documentation and reporting requirements?
Lessons learned and improvement processes?

Budget & Cost Considerations

DR budget allocation and constraints?
Cost vs risk tolerance analysis?
Reserved capacity vs on-demand preferences?
Insurance and risk transfer considerations?