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Advisory Service · Operational Resilience

Operational Resilience Program Build

End-to-end resilience program design: business continuity, disaster recovery, crisis management, testing, and regulatory alignment, built by someone who runs platform resiliency for a living, not someone who read the framework.

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What's included
  • BIA and critical service identification, with criticality driving recovery objectives
  • Dependency mapping across systems, sites, vendors, and people
  • RTO/RPO design reconciled against what your vendor SLAs actually promise
  • BC and DR plans written to be executed during an incident, not filed for audit
  • Crisis management structure and incident command design
  • A testing program from tabletop to technical, with findings that count as evidence
  • DORA, FFIEC, SEC, and FINRA alignment mapping
The problem

Every framework says the same thing. Programs still fail at 2am.

The frameworks are not the problem. ISO 22301, DORA, and FFIEC agree on the fundamentals, and most failing programs can show a mapping to all three. What they cannot show is a BIA the incident commander actually opens during the outage, an RTO that has ever been reconciled against the vendor SLA it silently depends on, or an exercise that produced findings anyone acted on. The program passes audit and fails the incident, in that order.

This engagement builds the program for the incident first and the audit second, on the theory that a program which works at 2am has no trouble producing evidence at 2pm. The scrutiny moments it is designed for: the outage bridge, the regulator's "show me your testing," and the board's "could that happen to us."

What the engagement covers

Six workstreams, from criticality to evidence

BIA and criticality

Impact scored across defined dimensions, criticality tiers derived from the scores, and recovery objectives that follow from criticality instead of gut feel. The arithmetic is visible at every step.

Dependency mapping

What each critical service actually depends on: systems, sites, vendors, and the people who know how it works. Optionally onto the Risk Intelligence Map, where the geography becomes visible.

Recovery strategy

RTO and RPO set from criticality, then reconciled against vendor SLAs and technical capability. Where the objective exceeds what the contract or the architecture can deliver, that gap is named, priced, and decided, not discovered mid-incident.

Plan build

BC and DR plans written for the person executing them under stress: decision points, contact paths, and the first hour spelled out. If a plan only makes sense to its author, it is not a plan.

Crisis structure

Incident command roles, activation criteria, escalation to executives, and communication templates, so the first fifteen minutes of a crisis are procedure, not improvisation.

Testing and alignment

A testing calendar that earns its cadence: tabletops with injects that hurt, technical failovers where they matter, findings tracked to closure, and the whole record mapped to DORA, FFIEC, SEC, and FINRA expectations.

What you walk away with

A program that works at 2am and shows evidence at 2pm

The BIA and dependency record

Critical services, impact scores, recovery objectives, and dependencies in one place, current enough to open during an incident.

Plans people can execute

BC, DR, and crisis documents structured for use under stress, with the recovery-gap decisions leadership made recorded next to them.

The testing record

Exercise scenarios, findings, and closure tracking in a form a regulator accepts as evidence, because it is evidence.

The regulatory map

Program components cross-walked to DORA, FFIEC, SEC, and FINRA expectations, so the exam conversation starts from your structure, not the examiner's checklist.

How it runs

Criticality first, paperwork last

Conversation

Your services, your regulators, your last bad day, and what exists already. Programs are rebuilt more often than built from zero, and both are fine.

Scoping

Which workstreams you need, which you already have, and the scope and price agreed before work starts. Nobody pays to rebuild what already works.

Build

BIA, recovery design, plans, and crisis structure built with your service owners in the room, tested as they land rather than at the end.

Prove

The first exercises run, findings closed, the testing calendar handed to its owner, and the regulatory map delivered with the evidence behind it.

Related reading

The thinking behind the service

Your BIA Is a Shelf Document, Your RTO and Your SLA Have Never Met, and Tabletops That Aren't Theater. If those failures sound familiar, this is the engagement that fixes them.

Build the program for the incident, not the binder

Scope and price are set in the first conversation, sized to what you already have.

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