In this blog post, we'll address a simple, board-ready way to measure and communicate business continuity/disaster recovery resilience.
You Cannot Manage What You Never Measure
Plenty of organisations talk about resilience. Far fewer can show it.
If you want business continuity and disaster recovery to be taken seriously at leadership level, you need a simple, honest way to answer:
“How resilient are we, really, and is it getting better or worse?”
That is where metrics and visual summaries come in.
Practical Metrics for BC and DR
You do not need a hundred KPIs. Start with a small set that truly tells a story.
Examples:
- Number of critical services with defined and approved RTO/RPO
If you haven’t agreed targets, everything else is guesswork. - Percentage of critical services covered by tested DR plans in the last 12 months
Not just plans that exist, but plans that have been exercised. - Average time to detect incidents (MTTD)
If you don’t know something is broken, you can’t fix it. - Average time to recover (MTTR)
How long does it take to get back to normal or an agreed interim state. - Dependency on single points of failure
For example, systems with no redundancy, processes dependent on one key individual, or concentration risk on a single provider.
Track these over time, so you can show a direction of travel rather than a snapshot.
Concise Heatmaps: A Blunt but Effective View
For board-level discussions, you need something that can be understood in seconds.
A concise heatmap is a small grid that uses colour (red, amber, green) to show where your continuity and recovery capability is strong, weak or unknown.
One effective pattern is:
- Rows: your top 10 critical services or processes
- Columns: key controls, such as
- RTO/RPO agreed
- BCP documented
- DR plan documented
- DR tested in last 12 months
- Third-party DR reviewed
- Owners and key people trained
Each cell gets a colour based on clear rules. For example:
- Green: in place and up to date
- Amber: partly in place or out of date
- Red: missing or unknown
In one glance the board can see where the real gaps are. The follow-up conversation is then about why a red cell is red, and what you’re going to do about it.
Add a simple trend view over time and you can show whether your resilience posture is improving or just being talked about.
Building a Multi-Year Resilience Roadmap
Resilience isn’t a one-off project but rather an ongoing capability.
A simple phased approach might look like:
Year 1: Establish the Basics
- Discover and classify critical services and processes
- Map their underlying systems and suppliers
- Agree RTO/RPO with business owners
- Put minimum viable DR in place for those services
Year 2: Remove the Worst Risks
- Identify and remove key single points of failure
- Mature your testing regime
- Tackle the most dangerous legacy systems and technical debt
- Tighten contracts and assurance with critical providers
Year 3 and Beyond: Optimise and Embed
- Automate more of your recovery and failover processes
- Integrate resilience requirements into every major change and project
- Use metrics and heatmaps as part of regular governance, not special reports
The point is to be explicit about what you will fix, in what order, and how you will know it’s working.
Treat Resilience as a Competitive Advantage
Recent history is clear. IT outages will happen. You don’t control that. What you do control is how prepared you are and how you respond.
If you have solid business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities:
- You lose less revenue when things go wrong
- You retain more customer trust
- You navigate regulatory pressure with fewer sleepless nights
So, what now?
- Put BC/DR on the next executive agenda
- Ask for a simple, honest view of your current resilience and gaps
- Commit to at least one tangible improvement this quarter
- And if you want help cutting through the noise, book a resilience workshop with us
Because when, not if, IT goes dark, you will not be judged on whether you could avoid every incident. You will be judged on how quickly and calmly you got back up.
Ready to Talk About Disaster Recovery?
