Description

This curriculum spans the equivalent depth and breadth of a multi-workshop program used to design and operationalize disaster recovery for enterprise application portfolios, covering technical architecture, cross-functional coordination, and compliance alignment across hybrid environments.

Module 1: Defining Recovery Objectives and Risk Assessment

Selecting appropriate Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) based on business impact analysis for critical applications.
Conducting threat modeling exercises to identify single points of failure across application dependencies and infrastructure layers.
Mapping application interdependencies to assess cascading failure risks during a disaster scenario.
Documenting regulatory requirements that dictate minimum availability and data retention standards per application tier.
Engaging business unit stakeholders to prioritize applications based on financial, operational, and compliance impact.
Establishing thresholds for declaring a disaster, including technical triggers and organizational approval workflows.

Module 2: Architecture for Resilient Application Design

Implementing stateless application components to enable rapid failover and horizontal scaling during recovery.
Designing data replication strategies (synchronous vs. asynchronous) based on RPO requirements and latency constraints.
Integrating circuit breakers and retry logic into microservices to prevent cascading failures during partial outages.
Selecting active-passive vs. active-active deployment models based on cost, complexity, and recovery performance needs.
Architecting cross-region deployment patterns while managing data sovereignty and egress cost implications.
Embedding health checks and readiness probes to automate traffic routing decisions during failover events.

Module 3: Data Protection and Backup Strategies

Configuring application-consistent backups using pre- and post-snapshot scripts for databases and file systems.
Validating backup integrity through periodic restore testing in isolated environments to confirm recoverability.
Managing encryption key replication and access controls to ensure backup data remains usable post-disaster.
Implementing immutable backup storage to protect against ransomware or malicious deletion.
Orchestrating backup schedules to minimize performance impact on production application workloads.
Classifying data by criticality to apply tiered backup frequencies and retention policies.

Module 4: Failover and Failback Orchestration

Developing runbooks that specify manual and automated steps for DNS, load balancer, and routing changes during failover.
Testing automated failover workflows in staging environments to validate execution order and dependency resolution.
Managing session persistence and client redirection during failover to minimize user disruption.
Coordinating database role transitions (e.g., primary to replica promotion) without data loss or corruption.
Planning for failback procedures, including data resynchronization and cutover timing to avoid downtime.
Logging and auditing all failover activities for post-incident review and compliance reporting.

Module 5: Cloud and Hybrid Environment Considerations

Establishing secure, high-bandwidth connectivity between on-premises and cloud environments for data replication.
Managing identity federation and role replication across environments to maintain access control during failover.
Selecting cloud-native disaster recovery services (e.g., AWS DRS, Azure Site Recovery) based on application compatibility.
Addressing licensing constraints for proprietary software when replicating to cloud-based recovery instances.
Monitoring cross-environment network latency to ensure it aligns with application performance SLAs.
Implementing consistent tagging and resource naming across environments to streamline recovery operations.

Module 6: Testing, Validation, and Continuous Improvement

Scheduling regular disaster recovery drills with defined scope, objectives, and rollback plans.
Measuring actual RTO and RPO during tests and adjusting infrastructure or processes to meet targets.
Coordinating test execution with change management to avoid conflicts with production deployments.
Using chaos engineering techniques to simulate infrastructure failures and validate application resilience.
Documenting test findings and implementing corrective actions in a tracked issue management system.
Updating disaster recovery plans following application changes, infrastructure upgrades, or organizational restructuring.

Module 7: Governance, Compliance, and Stakeholder Communication

Defining roles and responsibilities for incident response teams during disaster execution and recovery.
Aligning disaster recovery documentation with audit requirements for standards such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2.
Reporting recovery readiness metrics (e.g., test frequency, success rate) to executive leadership and board committees.
Managing third-party vendor SLAs for hosted services to ensure they support organizational recovery objectives.
Establishing communication protocols for notifying internal teams, customers, and regulators during an incident.
Conducting post-mortem reviews after real incidents or tests to refine processes and prevent recurrence.

Module 8: Automation and Tooling for Recovery Operations

Integrating infrastructure-as-code templates to ensure consistent recreation of application environments during recovery.
Developing custom scripts to automate validation checks for DNS, connectivity, and service availability post-failover.
Selecting and configuring orchestration platforms (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, Runbooks) for recovery workflows.
Implementing monitoring alerts that trigger based on failover status or recovery progress deviations.
Using version control for disaster recovery playbooks to track changes and enable rollback if needed.
Centralizing logs and metrics from recovery tools to enable real-time situational awareness during incidents.