AJC Strengthens Cyber Resilience in Mutuals
Mutual organisations continue to play a pivotal role in the UK financial landscape, and the need for robust cyber security...
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For years, organisations have leaned on data backups as their safety net. If files were lost or systems went offline, the assumption was straightforward, restore from backup and carry on. But in today’s interconnected, always-on digital economy, that assumption no longer holds. Backups alone cannot guarantee that operations will resume quickly, coherently, or in line with customer and regulatory expectations. What matters is not just storing data but being able to recover effectively, and recovery planning must define outcomes, not merely processes.
A backup is a snapshot in time. Recovery planning, by contrast, sets measurable expectations: which services must be restored, how quickly they must return, and how much data loss – if any – can be tolerated. Without this level of alignment between technology and business priorities, even the most comprehensive backup strategy can fall short.
The distinction between backups and recovery becomes clearer when viewed through the lens of business continuity. Business continuity ensures that critical functions remain available despite disruption, while disaster recovery focuses specifically on restoring IT systems and data after an incident. Neither can succeed in isolation.
The objective of disaster recovery is not merely to bring servers back online, but to restore the services they support, whether that’s patient records in a hospital, payroll systems in a public body, or online transactions in a retail platform. The goal is business resilience, not technical perfection.
Globally, organisations are increasingly guided by standards such as ISO 22301, the international benchmark for business continuity management systems. Originally derived from the UK’s BS 25999 framework, ISO 22301 is now applied across industries and jurisdictions.
It provides a structured model that goes beyond IT. By embedding continuity into leadership responsibilities, corporate governance, and continual improvement, the standard ensures that resilience is treated not as a one-off project, but as an organisational capability that evolves with the business.
For global firms operating in heavily regulated markets,such as finance, healthcare, and utilities, the ability to demonstrate compliance with ISO 22301 is not just good practice, but often strengths competitive position when bidding for contracts or meeting due diligence requirements.
At the heart of outcome-driven recovery planning are two metrics that translate resilience into measurable terms:
These metrics are business decisions as much as technical ones. A global trading platform may need RTOs measured in seconds and near-zero RPOs, while a regional service provider may accept several hours of downtime provided the previous day’s data is intact. Misaligned RTOs and RPOs, however, can render recovery efforts ineffective, leaving systems restored but business operations crippled.
No recovery plan is complete until it has been tested. Tabletop exercises, partial recovery drills, and full-scale simulations all serve to validate assumptions, expose weaknesses, and confirm that staff know their responsibilities when a crisis strikes. Organisations that only discover gaps in the middle of an outage pay the highest price, through financial loss, regulatory sanction, or reputational harm.
Research by the Business Continuity Institute has repeatedly shown that organisations without a formal business continuity management system are significantly more likely to fail within three years of a major disruption. The cost of resilience is not trivial, but the cost of failure is far higher.
In every sector, from healthcare and education to logistics and banking, the same lesson emerges. Backups provide a foundation, but they are only the beginning. What separates resilient organisations from vulnerable ones is their ability to recover in a way that meets customer expectations, regulatory demands, and operational realities.
The shift is not technical, but cultural. The critical question is no longer “Do we have backups?” but “Can we recover in the way our stakeholders expect?” That is what defines true resilience in the digital era.
At AJC, we help organisations move beyond basic backup strategies to build true recovery-focused resilience. Our business continuity services support clients to:
By combining business continuity expertise with deep cyber security and resilience knowledge, we help organisations ensure that when disruption strikes, recovery is not only possible but proven.
Contact us on 020 7101 4861 or email us at info@ajollyconsulting.co.uk if you think we can help.
Sources:
https://www.nqa.com/en-gb/resources/blog/September-2020/Guide-To-ISO-22301
https://www.proofpoint.com/us/threat-reference/disaster-recovery
https://ng-it.co.uk/blog-rto-vs-rpo-metrics-defining-your-dr-plan/
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