Shady ASAccording to Uptime Institute's 2022 Outage Analysis Report, more than 60% of service outages now lead to at least USD 100,000 in total losses — a significant increase from 39% just three years earlier. Meanwhile, 15% of outages cost organisations over USD 1 million. These figures underscore a hard truth: downtime is not just an inconvenience, it is a direct threat to business viability.
Yet only 54% of organisations have an established, company-wide disaster recovery plan. The remaining 46% are operating without a safety net — gambling that they will never face a ransomware attack, hardware failure, natural disaster, or human error serious enough to disrupt operations. For businesses in Belgium and across Europe, where regulatory requirements for business continuity are tightening, this gap represents both a business risk and a compliance liability.
RTO, RPO, and the business impact analysis
Every disaster recovery plan starts with two fundamental metrics: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The RTO defines the maximum acceptable duration of downtime — how quickly your systems must be restored. The RPO defines the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time — how far back your most recent recoverable backup can be. An RTO of four hours and an RPO of one hour, for example, means your systems must be back online within four hours and you can afford to lose no more than one hour of data.
Setting these objectives requires a Business Impact Analysis (BIA), which systematically evaluates the financial and operational consequences of disruption to each business function. Not all systems have the same criticality: an e-commerce platform may require an RTO of minutes, while an internal document management system might tolerate hours. The BIA helps you allocate recovery resources where they matter most, avoiding both over-investment in low-impact systems and under-protection of critical ones.
The average cost of downtime, estimated at USD 88,000 per hour according to Veeam's 2022 Data Protection Report, provides a starting point for quantifying impact. However, your organisation's specific costs will depend on factors including revenue per hour, contractual obligations to customers, regulatory penalties, and reputational damage that may be harder to quantify.
Backup strategies: the 3-2-1 rule and beyond
The 3-2-1 backup rule remains a foundational best practice: maintain at least three copies of your data, on two different types of storage media, with one copy stored off-site. This approach protects against a wide range of failure scenarios — a single disk failure, a site-wide disaster, or even corruption that affects one storage medium but not another.
However, the modern threat landscape — particularly ransomware — demands enhancements to this classic approach. Many organisations now adopt a 3-2-1-1 strategy, adding an air-gapped or immutable backup copy that cannot be reached or altered by an attacker who compromises the primary network. Immutable backups, offered by many modern backup solutions, ensure that backup data cannot be encrypted, deleted, or modified for a defined retention period.
Backup frequency must align with your RPO. If your RPO is one hour, daily backups are insufficient — you need at minimum hourly incremental backups. Technologies such as continuous data protection (CDP) can reduce RPO to near-zero by capturing every change as it occurs. The key is matching your backup strategy to the recovery objectives established in your BIA.
Cloud-based disaster recovery (DRaaS)
The Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) market was valued at USD 32.3 billion in 2022, reflecting a major shift in how organisations approach DR. DRaaS enables businesses to replicate their critical systems and data to a cloud environment, from which they can failover in the event of a disaster — often within minutes rather than the hours or days required by traditional approaches.
For SMEs in particular, DRaaS eliminates the need to maintain a dedicated secondary data centre, dramatically reducing the capital expenditure associated with disaster recovery. The pay-as-you-go model means organisations pay primarily for storage and replication during normal operations, with compute costs only incurred during an actual failover event.
When evaluating DRaaS providers, key considerations include the geographic location of recovery infrastructure (relevant for GDPR data residency requirements), the provider's SLA for failover time and data integrity, the ease of testing failover procedures, and the ability to perform partial recovery of individual systems rather than requiring a full-site failover.
Testing your DR plan: beyond the checkbox
A disaster recovery plan that has never been tested is not a plan — it is a hope. DR testing should occur at minimum annually, with critical systems tested more frequently. There are several levels of testing, each providing increasing confidence. A tabletop exercise walks through the plan on paper with key stakeholders. A simulation test executes recovery procedures without actually failing over production systems. A full failover test actually switches operations to the recovery environment and validates that business functions can operate from there.
Each test should generate documentation of what worked, what failed, and what needs improvement. Common issues discovered during testing include outdated recovery procedures, credentials that have changed since the plan was written, dependencies on systems or personnel that were not documented, and recovery times that exceed the stated RTO.
The most valuable aspect of testing is cultural: it builds organisational muscle memory for crisis response. When a real disaster strikes, the stress and time pressure are immense. Teams that have practised their roles and procedures are far more likely to execute effectively than those encountering the plan for the first time under duress.
Regulatory requirements and ISO 22301
In Belgium and the broader EU, business continuity planning is increasingly a regulatory expectation. Financial services firms are subject to requirements from the National Bank of Belgium and the FSMA. The NIS2 Directive, applicable from October 2024, extends business continuity obligations to essential and important entities across multiple sectors including energy, transport, health, and digital infrastructure.
ISO 22301 provides the international standard framework for Business Continuity Management Systems (BCMS). It offers a structured approach to establishing, implementing, operating, monitoring, reviewing, and improving your organisation's ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions. Certification to ISO 22301 demonstrates to customers, regulators, and partners that your business continuity practices meet an internationally recognised standard.
Even for organisations that do not pursue formal certification, the ISO 22301 framework provides a valuable structure for building and maturing your DR capabilities. Its emphasis on leadership commitment, risk assessment, documented procedures, regular testing, and continuous improvement aligns with the practical requirements of effective disaster recovery.
How Shady AS can help
At Shady AS SRL, we specialise in designing and implementing disaster recovery solutions tailored to the specific needs and risk profile of Belgian businesses. From conducting business impact analyses and defining RTO/RPO targets to deploying backup infrastructure, configuring DRaaS environments, and running full failover tests, our team in Brussels provides end-to-end DR expertise.
Whether you are building a disaster recovery plan from scratch, modernising an outdated plan, or preparing for NIS2 compliance, contact Shady AS SRL to ensure your business can withstand and recover from any disruption.