BDR Assessment Checklist
The complete backup and disaster recovery checklist for UK businesses. Assess your strategy, identify gaps, and ensure business continuity.
Why This Checklist?
43% of UK businesses that experience a major data loss event never reopen. Yet most organisations discover their backup strategy has gaps only when disaster strikes.
This comprehensive checklist helps you assess your current backup and disaster recovery posture against industry best practices. Based on ISO 22301 business continuity standards and NCSC guidelines, it covers the critical areas that determine whether you'll recover from an incident or become a statistic.
What You'll Assess
- Backup infrastructure and redundancy
- Recovery objectives (RTO/RPO) alignment
- Ransomware and security protection
- Cloud and offsite storage strategy
- Testing and validation procedures
Who Should Use This Checklist?
IT Managers
Validate your backup strategy and identify gaps before the next audit or incident.
Business Leaders
Understand your organisation's disaster recovery readiness and make informed investment decisions.
Compliance Officers
Ensure backup and recovery procedures meet regulatory requirements for your industry.
RTO/RPO Calculator
Calculate your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to determine the right backup strategy for your business.
Backup Infrastructure
Your backup infrastructure is the foundation of disaster recovery. These items ensure you have reliable, redundant systems capable of protecting your critical data.
Implement the 3-2-1-1-0 rule: 3 copies, 2 media types, 1 offsite, 1 immutable, 0 errors in recovery testing.
Recovery Objectives (RTO/RPO)
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) define how quickly you need to recover and how much data loss is acceptable.
Review and validate RTO/RPO targets annually, or whenever significant business changes occur. Consider the cost of downtime vs. the cost of protection.
Data Protection & Coverage
Ensuring all critical data is included in your backup strategy. Missing data from backups is only discovered when you need it most.
Maintain a data classification system and ensure backup coverage matches data criticality. Critical data should have more frequent backups and faster recovery options.
Testing & Validation
Untested backups are worthless. Regular testing ensures your backups work when you need them and your team knows the recovery procedures.
Schedule quarterly disaster recovery drills. Time your recoveries and compare against RTO targets. Document lessons learned and update procedures.
Security & Access Control
Backups are a prime target for ransomware. Protecting backup infrastructure is as important as protecting production systems.
Implement the principle of least privilege. Use dedicated service accounts for backup operations and store encryption keys in a secure vault separate from backup infrastructure.
Documentation & Procedures
Clear documentation enables anyone to perform recovery, not just the person who configured the backups. Essential for business continuity.
Store recovery documentation in at least two locations: an offline copy (printed or USB) and a cloud location accessible without your internal systems.
Compliance & Regulatory
Many industries have specific requirements for data retention, backup, and disaster recovery. Non-compliance can result in significant penalties.
Create a compliance matrix mapping each regulation to specific backup requirements. Review with legal counsel annually.
Cloud & Offsite Storage
Geographic separation protects against site-wide disasters. Cloud backup provides scalability and off-premises protection.
Ensure offsite storage is at least 100km from your primary site. Test cloud recovery annually and factor data egress costs into your disaster recovery budget.
Monitoring & Alerting
If you don't know a backup failed, you can't fix it. Proactive monitoring ensures issues are caught before they become disasters.
Implement a daily backup verification process. Assign responsibility for reviewing backup reports and create an escalation path for failures.
Business Continuity Integration
Backups are one component of broader business continuity. Integration ensures coordinated response during incidents.
Conduct annual tabletop exercises involving IT, management, and key business stakeholders. Update plans based on lessons learned and business changes.
Quick Summary Checklist
Track your overall progress with this simplified summary. Focus on critical items first.
Infrastructure
Recovery
Security
Documentation
Get the Printable PDF Version
Download the complete BDR Assessment Checklist as a printable PDF. Perfect for team reviews, audits, and ongoing assessment.
- All 60+ assessment items
- Priority ratings and tips
- Space for notes and actions
- Recovery time calculator worksheet
Frequently Asked Questions
The 3-2-1 rule means keeping 3 copies of your data, on 2 different types of media, with 1 copy stored offsite. Many organisations now extend this to 3-2-1-1-0: adding 1 immutable copy and targeting 0 errors in recovery testing.
RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is how quickly you need systems restored after a disaster. RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time. For example, an RPO of 4 hours means losing up to 4 hours of data is acceptable.
File-level recovery should be tested monthly. Full system recovery (bare-metal restore) should be tested quarterly. After any major infrastructure changes, additional testing is recommended.
Yes. Cloud providers operate on a shared responsibility model. They protect their infrastructure, but you are responsible for your data. Microsoft's retention policies are limited, and deleted data can be permanently lost after 30-93 days.
An immutable backup cannot be modified or deleted for a specified period, even by administrators. This protects against ransomware that attempts to delete backups before encrypting production data.
Retention depends on business needs and regulations. Common patterns: 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly, 7 yearly. Regulated industries may require longer retention (e.g., financial services typically need 7 years).
Get a Free BDR Assessment
Let our specialists review your backup and disaster recovery strategy. We'll identify gaps, validate your approach, and provide actionable recommendations – at no cost.
Or download the PDF checklist above and assess yourself first.