Backups and Recovery
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? Set business-led recovery objectives and conduct restoration exercises with someone other than the original implementer.
What You Will Be Able to Decide
- Explain backups and recovery in product and business terms.
- Apply this decision: Set business-led recovery objectives and conduct restoration exercises with someone other than the original implementer.
- Recognise this material risk: the company pays for backups but lacks credentials, instructions, or time to restore them.
- Use this review: Exercise contractor offboarding, secret rotation, backup restore, and the first incident handoff for the customer portal.
A founder is clarifying who controls the product and how the company will respond when something goes wrong. This lesson gives you a concrete question to take into a build brief, proposal review, or product decision.
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? The course example is A small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations; use it to decide what evidence would justify the choice before a builder implements it.
What Does Backups and Recovery Mean for Your Product?
A founder is clarifying who controls the product and how the company will respond when something goes wrong.
Use the illustrative service for this course (A small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations) to make the choice concrete. Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident?
Technical term
Backups and Recovery
Backups preserve recoverable copies; recovery combines people, access, procedures, and tested restoration into resumed service.
How Should a Founder Use Backups and Recovery?
For a small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations, ask what would happen if the company pays for backups but lacks credentials, instructions, or time to restore them.
For this decision, the useful standard is that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- Decision: Set business-led recovery objectives and conduct restoration exercises with someone other than the original implementer.
- Evidence to request: show that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- Owner: name who will respond if the company pays for backups but lacks credentials, instructions, or time to restore them.
- Record the result in the security, ownership, and handover record.
- Practical review: Exercise contractor offboarding, secret rotation, backup restore, and the first incident handoff for the customer portal.
How Do You Choose an Approach to Backups and Recovery?
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? Set business-led recovery objectives and conduct restoration exercises with someone other than the original implementer.
The risk is that the company pays for backups but lacks credentials, instructions, or time to restore them. Compare a simpler option with the proposed one, including who will operate either choice.
- Describe the user or business outcome that must be protected.
- Identify the most credible failure and its consequence.
- Compare the simplest adequate approach with one realistic alternative.
- Set a review point for when the decision may need to change.
What Evidence Should You Accept for Backups and Recovery?
What Warning Signs Should You Look For?
- The proposal does not address this risk: the company pays for backups but lacks credentials, instructions, or time to restore them.
- Nobody can show whether access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- The decision has no named owner or review point.
What Should You Ask a Consultant?
- What changes for the user if we choose this approach to backups and recovery?
- How have we reduced or accepted this risk: the company pays for backups but lacks credentials, instructions, or time to restore them.
- Can you demonstrate that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual?
- Who owns the result, and when will we reconsider it?
Key takeaway
Key Takeaway
Set business-led recovery objectives and conduct restoration exercises with someone other than the original implementer. Ask for evidence against the specific risk: the company pays for backups but lacks credentials, instructions, or time to restore them.