Cloud Solutions | 8 min read
SaaS Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan: What Good Looks Like
A practical framework for designing and testing resilience before outages become customer-impacting events.
A SaaS disaster recovery and business continuity plan should be built around business commitments. Recovery targets must match customer expectations, contractual obligations, and operational constraints.
Define service tiers and recovery objectives
Set RTO and RPO by service tier, then align architecture and runbooks to those targets.
Design failover pathways with dependency mapping
Database, messaging, identity, and third-party dependencies must be included in resilience design.
Create response playbooks for likely failure modes
Playbooks should include communication ownership and status update cadence.
- Region-level cloud outage
- Data corruption events
- Identity provider disruption
- Critical third-party API failure
Test through realistic game days
Tabletop exercises are useful, but controlled failover drills provide stronger operational proof.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should DR tests be run?
At minimum biannually for major systems, with more frequent validation for highly critical customer-facing services.
What is commonly missed in continuity planning?
Communication workflows, especially status-page ownership and customer escalation paths.
Next Step
SenseSys can help design resilience architecture and run continuity exercises for your SaaS platform.