Situation
The business context
A large restaurant company had no formal enterprise business continuity or disaster recovery program. Recovery planning existed in pockets, but it was fragmented, inconsistently documented, and rarely validated through testing. There was no enterprise-wide business impact analysis connecting business processes to the technology services that supported them, no consistent framework for defining recovery priorities, and limited confidence that critical systems could be restored within acceptable timeframes following a significant disruption.
Task
The leadership mandate
As a senior IT leader, I was responsible for establishing an enterprise BCDR program from the ground up and translating business continuity needs into clear technology recovery requirements. The mandate was to identify the systems most critical to operations, establish clear recovery objectives and accountability, implement repeatable plans and procedures, and demonstrate that the organization could restore in-scope applications within established tolerances.
Strategy
The strategic approach
My strategy was to establish BCDR as a continuous, business-led lifecycle rather than an ad hoc technology recovery exercise. Business impact analysis would establish business criticality and recovery requirements, which technology owners would translate into executable recovery plans. Recurring exercises would validate those plans, expose gaps, and inform the next cycle. System coverage would expand progressively as the program matured, supported by a published calendar that established an ongoing operating cadence.
Action
How the work moved forward
- Established a business-led BCDR lifecycle: Published a recurring calendar covering business impact analysis, recovery planning, exercise preparation, remediation, and refinement. Partnered with leaders across business and technology to identify critical systems and translate operational tolerance into measurable RTO and RPO objectives.
- Translated requirements into executable plans: Worked with application and technology owners to develop dozens of Disaster Recovery Plans and Application Recovery Plans with documented responsibilities, dependencies, and recovery procedures.
- Scoped the initial exercise around foundational recovery capabilities: Focused the first exercise on the minimum set of technology services required to execute a credible recovery test, including the capabilities necessary to establish connectivity, access systems, and perform the planned failover.
- Tested a full primary data center isolation scenario: Severed network access to and from the primary data center, effectively taking it offline, and exercised planned failover to the recovery data center. Planning involved nearly 100 business and technology participants across corporate, restaurant-facing, and guest-facing systems for all brands.
- Used testing to drive continuous improvement: Captured technical and procedural gaps after each exercise, assigned remediation, refined recovery plans and targets, and used a more frequent initial testing cadence to accelerate learning.
Result
The measurable difference
- Established a formal enterprise BCDR capability where none had previously existed, creating a repeatable framework for identifying recovery requirements, documenting recovery procedures, testing readiness, and remediating gaps.
- Delivered the initial enterprise recovery exercise within eight months of the first BIA meeting, establishing the foundation from which the program could expand and mature.
- Expanded recovery coverage from foundational technology services to dozens of recovery plans spanning corporate, restaurant-facing, and guest-facing applications across all brands.
- Achieved 100% of agreed RTO and RPO targets across all applications in scope during recovery exercises.
- Institutionalized BCDR as an ongoing enterprise discipline, establishing a semiannual testing cadence and shared accountability across business and technology leaders for recovery priorities, plan quality, and ongoing readiness.
Leadership insight
Operational resilience is built through repeated testing and learning. Business leaders must define what matters, technology teams must translate those priorities into executable plans, and recurring exercises must be used to challenge assumptions, correct gaps, and expand readiness over time.