Phase 03 · Recovery

After the storm: the recovery you documented before you needed it.

The businesses that recover fastest are the ones that documented their recovery plan before they needed it. Restore systematically, verify thoroughly, and capture every lesson while it is still fresh.

First 24h

Safety + assessment

Day 2–5

Restoration + verification

Within 5 days

After-action review

Assess before you act

Rushing recovery causes more outages than the storm did. Confirm the physical environment is safe and the threat has truly passed before you touch infrastructure.

Site safety walk-through with documented photos
Verify power quality, HVAC, and physical security
Triage damage: facilities, hardware, connectivity, data

Restore in priority order

Bring systems back in the order your business depends on them. Resist the temptation to restore everything in parallel — it multiplies risk and obscures root cause when something fails.

Sequence restoration by business criticality (RTO order)
Failback from secondary regions only after primary is validated
Run data integrity checks before re-opening user traffic
Hold post-restoration smoke tests on every critical workflow

Verify, document, and learn

Recovery is not finished when systems are green — it is finished when the lessons are captured and the next plan is better than the last one.

Security verification: rotate credentials, review access logs
Document business impact and capture for insurance
Run after-action review within 5 business days
Update runbooks and continuity plan with what you learned

Download recovery guide Reassess readiness