Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.
6 to work through
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intermediate
A business continuity manager asks for your disaster recovery plan. You give them the RTO/RPO matrix and they say it is not what they need. What is missing?
1 min answer -
intermediate
A communication platform is business-critical for its customers' own operations. What does business continuity require beyond technical disaster recovery?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A distributed commerce and logistics operation depends on physical infrastructure across many locations. How does business continuity planning differ from IT disaster recovery?
2 min answer -
intermediate Multiple choice
A marketplace's payment provider is not down. Authorisation p99 rises from 400 ms to 25 s and 12% of authorisations time out. The continuity plan states an RTO of 30 minutes and documents a failover to a second provider that takes 20 minutes and requires a named executive's decision. What actually happens in the first hour?
3 min answer -
advanced
A ticketing platform expects 2 million buyers for a concert on-sale and receives 14 million requests, many from bots. How should waiting rooms, admission tokens, bot mitigation, fair queueing, inventory holds and user-facing status interact?
3 min answer -
advanced
Your primary system is unavailable for six hours. What must the business be able to do without it, and what have you prepared?
2 min answer
4 terms in this topic
Business Continuity
Keeping the business operating through disruption — a broader discipline than disaster recovery, and one that includes not using the system at all.
practiceBusiness Impact Analysis
Determining which business processes must be restored, how quickly, and what the consequence of not doing so is — the input from which recovery targe…
practiceManual Fallback Capacity
The transactions per hour a business can actually complete without its system - the measured number that says whether a recovery-time objective is su…
patternVirtual Waiting Room
A separately-hosted queue in front of a constrained system that admits users at a sustainable rate with a held place and honest status - converting a…
Neighbouring topics
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.