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Articles September 23, 2025

The Architecture of Readiness: Why Disaster Recovery Needs a Capability Model

Milanie Cleere Darrell Norton
Authors
Milanie Cleere, Darrell Norton

Most organizations don’t believe they’re ready for disaster recovery. Not because they’re ignoring the risks, but because they’re unsure where to begin. Is it an IT problem? Should business impact analyses come first? Who owns recovery when teams don’t talk to each other? This uncertainty is the real threat. In our work with global enterprises, we’ve seen the same pattern repeat: leaders know disaster recovery is important, but they’re paralyzed by fragmentation. IT teams may have backups and business units may have continuity plans, but rarely are these efforts coordinated, validated, or aligned to a shared strategy.

The result is a false sense of security. Documentation exists, but execution is unclear. Ownership is assumed but not confirmed. And when disruption hits, the gaps become visible through delayed recoveries, missed obligations, and fractured customer experiences. That’s why readiness models matter. They give organizations a way to diagnose where they are, align on what matters, and act with confidence. Not as a compliance exercise, but as a capability-building framework that spans systems, processes, and people.

Survey as a Diagnostic Engine

Disaster recovery readiness can’t be assessed through intuition or anecdote. It requires structured input across domains, stakeholders, and systems. That’s why we built a comprehensive assessment process designed not to confirm readiness, but to expose gaps.  It consists of a survey and workshops that quickly identify alignment, ownership, and technical investment opportunities to improve resiliency across the enterprise.

At a Fortune 500 holding company, CapTech deployed this survey across ten high-impact applications. It spanned dozens of questions across nine domains, including:

  • Architecture and hosting
  • Recovery objectives (RTO/RPO)
  • Dependency mapping
  • Backup and testing practices
  • Monitoring and observability
  • Access and identity management
  • Documentation and ownership
  • Compliance and regulated data handling

The survey didn’t just collect data, it revealed patterns, showing where recovery objectives were undefined, where dependencies were undocumented, and where ownership was unclear. It gave the client a starting point and a way to move forward.

Mapping Responses to Readiness

Survey responses were mapped to a structured readiness model to surface actionable opportunities. The model defined five levels of capability, from ad hoc to optimized, across three dimensions:

Systems and Data

Are recovery targets defined, tested, and tracked?

Processes

Are continuity procedures standardized, automated, and validated?

People and Roles

Is accountability distributed, documented, and embedded in governance?

This mapping helped the company interpret its current state with clarity. For example:

  • Inconsistent RTO/RPO validation placed systems in a “repeatable” state — some awareness, but no assurance.
  • Siloed recovery ownership flagged a lack of defined roles and cross-functional coordination.
  • Missing dependency maps revealed blind spots in upstream/downstream impact.
  • Unmonitored backup failures pointed to a need for alerting, response playbooks, and observability tooling.
  • The model didn’t just show where the organization was, it showed what it would take to improve.

The Readiness Model in Action

Once the survey responses were mapped, the readiness model became more than a framework — it became a planning tool. What began as a diagnostic quickly evolved into a shared lens for decision-making. It gave the organization a way to interpret its current state, prioritize its next steps, and coordinate across functions that had previously operated in silos.

The model contextualized gaps, showing how fragmented ownership, undocumented dependencies, or untested recovery objectives weren’t isolated issues, but symptoms of broader capability shortfalls. And it gave teams a way to talk about those issues in a structured, non-blaming way.

It allowed the company to:

Prioritize improvements based on risk and impact

Assign ownership across business, IT, and compliance

Align recovery expectations with regulatory and operational needs

Build a roadmap that was both strategic and executable

Perhaps most importantly, it created a shared language. Teams could now talk about readiness in terms of capability, not just compliance. They could see how their systems, processes, and roles contributed to enterprise resilience. And they could begin to shift the conversation from “Are we covered?” to “Are we ready?”

Why Readiness Models Matter

Disaster recovery is often misunderstood as a technical function — a matter of backups, failovers, and infrastructure. But in reality, it’s a trust function. When systems go down, what’s at stake is customer confidence, brand credibility, regulatory compliance, and operational continuity. And in that context, vague assurances of readiness aren’t enough.

A readiness model gives organizations a structured way to move beyond assumptions. It creates a shared understanding of what capability looks like across the business. It helps leaders see where they are, where they need to go, and what it will take to get there. It helps organizations:

  • Clarify expectations across business, IT, and compliance
  • Target investment toward the most critical gaps
  • Embed DR into governance and enterprise risk
  • Track progress with measurable indicators
  • Build resilience that’s proactive, not reactive

 

In short, it turns continuity planning into a capability — one that can be led, tested, and improved. It replaces guesswork with structure and static plans with dynamic readiness. And in a world where disruption is constant, that shift is not just strategic — it’s essential.

Capability Over Compliance

Too often, disaster recovery is treated as a compliance checkbox, whether that’s a binder on a shelf, a yearly test that is ignored, or a line item in an audit. But real resilience requires more than documentation. It demands structure, ownership, and iteration. It requires organizations to treat disaster recovery not as a one-time project, but as a living capability that evolves with the business and the threat landscape.

The readiness model gives organizations a way to see themselves clearly — not just in terms of what’s written down, but in terms of what they can actually execute under pressure. It creates alignment across business, IT, and compliance. It turns uncertainty into insight, and insight into action.

If your organization is unsure where to start or how to move forward, CapTech can help. We work with global enterprises to assess readiness, build capability, and operationalize resilience. Let’s move beyond the illusion of readiness and build something real. Contact CapTech to start your readiness assessment.

Milanie Cleere

Senior Advisor, CapTech and CEO, KYD

Milanie is a strategic problem solver who balances pragmatism with systems-level, future-oriented thinking. She brings expertise in product portfolio leadership, AI-driven process automation, and organizational transformation. Milanie draws on deep experience leading in complex organizations to guide diverse teams and scale transformation through clear strategy, technical depth, and an entrepreneurial mindset.

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Darrell Norton

Darrell Norton

Principal, Systems Integration

Darrell has nearly 30 years of experience developing enterprise solutions. Pragmatic and decisive, he excels at translating and communicating technical concepts and issues into business language, specializing in enterprise architecture, cloud integration, and SaaS system development. He’s worked with Microsoft .NET since the first beta and takes pride in the fact that his work is always tailored for each client.

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