Skip to main content
Seintec

Continuity

Business continuity

Defining which processes cannot stop, how long each one can be out of service and which infrastructure and procedures support that.

Request a continuity review936 940 176

The starting point

Continuity is not bought, it is designed. Before discussing technology you need to know which processes sustain invoicing and production, and what each hour of downtime costs the business.

What we usually find

  • Nobody has written down how long each application can be down.
  • Backups exist, but there is no tested recovery procedure.
  • Recovery depends on one person who knows the environment.
  • Tests are postponed because something more urgent always comes up.

Which companies it fits

Industrial, logistics or service companies where prolonged downtime directly affects customers, production or compliance.

We analyse critical processes, dependencies and current recovery times against what the business actually needs.

Request a continuity review

What the solution includes

  • Critical process analysis

    Which applications support each process and in what order they must come back.

  • Agreed RTO and RPO

    Time and data-loss objectives agreed in writing, with the measures that make them achievable.

  • Standby infrastructure

    Replication, off-site backup or an alternative environment in our datacenter, depending on the objective.

  • Testing and documentation

    Periodic drills with a results report and the adjustments applied.

How it is deployed

  1. 1Interviews with management and area leads.
  2. 2Classification of applications by criticality.
  3. 3Design of the standby architecture and procedures.
  4. 4Real recovery test and plan adjustment.
  5. 5Periodic review when applications or processes change.

Real-world scenarios

Fire or flooding in the server room

A physical incident at the office hits servers and backups at once when both sit in the same building. Continuity starts by separating the two geographically: a copy held off site, in our datacentre, allows essential services to be brought back even if the premises are unusable for days.

The annual recovery test

Once a year a planned recovery of critical systems is carried out and timed. The exercise updates the documentation, confirms that emergency contacts and credentials are still valid, and uncovers dependencies nobody remembered, such as a licensing service or an expiring certificate.

What the plan includes

The plan covers the inventory of systems and their criticality, recovery objectives agreed system by system, the standby architecture, the restore order, emergency contacts and credentials, and the test calendar. Seintec executes the technical side and documents each test with real timings. The organisational decisions — who activates the plan, how it is communicated and what is done manually during the contingency — are defined by the company with our methodological support. A plan covering only the technical half leaves out half of what actually happens.

What is at stake if it is left unaddressed

  • A plan written but never executed

    A document with no real test usually fails on the details: start-up order, expired credentials or external dependencies nobody accounted for.

  • Backup and system in the same place

    If the backup shares building, power and network with the server, any physical incident takes out both at the same time.

  • Unagreed expectations

    Without written recovery objectives, management expects minutes while the technical team is preparing for hours. That conversation belongs before the incident.

Services involved

Related sectors

See all solutions

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between backup and continuity?
Backup lets you recover data; continuity defines how quickly and in what order the business resumes, with the resources needed to achieve it.
What are RTO and RPO?
RTO is the maximum acceptable time to restore a service and RPO the maximum amount of information that may be lost, measured in time.
How often should it be tested?
It depends on criticality and on environment changes; a frequency is agreed and every test is documented.
Do you guarantee there will be no downtime?
No. We agree objectives, measures and tests; no serious provider guarantees the complete absence of incidents.
What recovery objectives are realistic?
They depend on what an outage costs each process, not on a generic figure. They are agreed system by system: identity and network usually come first, then the application that carries the main activity, then everything else. Those objectives are documented, checked against the available architecture and revised after each test.
How often should recovery be tested?
At least once a year for critical systems, and whenever something significant changes: a migration, a new application or a change of provider. Between full exercises, partial checks restoring files and databases are quick to run and catch most problems before they matter.
Is continuity purely a technical matter?
No. The technical side is half of it: someone has to decide who communicates, on what basis the plan is activated, how clients and suppliers are informed, and how work carried out during the contingency is validated afterwards. That organisational part is documented alongside the technical procedures.
Where do you start when nothing is documented?
With the inventory and a conversation at management level about which processes cannot stop and for how long. That prioritises three or four systems, lets us check whether the current architecture can meet the objective, and fixes whatever is missing before writing a long document.

Request a continuity review

We analyse critical processes, dependencies and current recovery times against what the business actually needs.

Request a continuity review