Use Case

Disaster Recovery for Regulatory Compliance

How regulated businesses move from informal, untested backups to a documented recovery plan with defined SLAs that satisfy an audit or insurance requirement.

The Problem

Regulated businesses, financial services firms, insurance brokers, government contractors, and similar organizations regularly face an audit, regulator, or insurance renewal asking for proof of a documented recovery time objective and verified off-site data replication. For many of these businesses, what actually exists is far less formal than what’s being asked for.

Backups might be happening, but no one has actually tested a full restore. There’s no documented recovery time anyone could point to with confidence. The plan, if it exists at all, lives in someone’s head rather than in a document an auditor could review.

This usually isn’t discovered until it matters, when a renewal questionnaire or an actual incident reveals the gap between what’s assumed to be in place and what’s actually been verified.

At a Glance

Best fit: Regulated businesses facing audit, regulator, or insurance documentation requirements

Core problem solved: Informal, untested backup practices that can’t be documented for compliance

Underlying technology: Defined recovery time and recovery point objectives with off-site replication

Typical trigger: An audit, renewal, or near-miss exposing the gap between assumed and actual recovery capability

Time to value: A documented, tested plan can typically be in place within a few weeks of starting the assessment

What Triggers This Conversation

An audit or renewal asking for a defined RTO

The questionnaire asks for a specific number that doesn’t currently exist on paper anywhere.

A regulator or client requesting proof

A documented, tested plan is requested, not just an assurance that backups exist.

Realizing backups have never been tested

Nobody actually knows if a full restore would work, because nobody has tried one.

A near-miss data loss event

A close call exposes how informal the current recovery process really is.

Who Owns This Decision

Compliance or risk management is usually the function asking the original question, since they’re the ones responding to the regulator, auditor, or insurer directly and need a real answer, not an assumption.

IT typically owns implementing the actual recovery plan, but the requirement and the budget case usually originate from compliance, since the cost of not having a documented plan is measured in audit findings or insurance terms, not just technical risk.

This conversation is almost always reactive, prompted by a specific renewal, audit, or regulatory deadline, rather than a proactive review undertaken on its own timeline.

When This Isn’t the Right Fit

  • Businesses with no regulatory, audit, or insurance requirement around data recovery
  • Organizations that already have a documented, tested plan satisfying their current obligations
  • Very small operations with minimal critical data and no compliance exposure

What Success Looks Like

A Documented Recovery Time

A specific, written recovery time objective ready to show an auditor or regulator.

Tested, Verified Replication

Off-site replication that’s actually been tested with a full restore, not just assumed to work.

Confidence Heading Into a Renewal

No scrambling the week before an audit or insurance renewal is due.

How Fidalia Solves This

Fidalia’s Disaster Recovery as a Service establishes a defined recovery time objective and recovery point objective for critical systems, backed by off-site replication that’s regularly tested rather than assumed to work.

The result is documentation suitable for an audit, regulator, or insurance renewal, a clear answer to the question of how quickly the business could recover, supported by evidence the plan has actually been verified.

This is built around the business’s specific compliance obligations, rather than a generic backup arrangement retrofitted to look compliant after the fact.

Learn More about Disaster Recovery as a Service

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between a recovery time objective and a recovery point objective?
Recovery time objective is how long it takes to restore systems after an incident. Recovery point objective is how much data, measured in time, could be lost in that recovery, for example the last hour versus the last day of changes.
How often is the recovery plan actually tested?
Testing is done on a regular, defined schedule rather than left untested indefinitely, so the documented recovery time reflects something that’s actually been verified.
Will this documentation actually satisfy our auditor or insurer?
Fidalia works from the specific requirements being asked for, whether that’s a regulator, auditor, or insurance renewal, to ensure the documentation produced addresses what’s actually being requested.
What kind of data is included in off-site replication?
This is scoped to the critical systems and records relevant to the business’s compliance obligations, determined during the initial assessment.
How quickly can this be put in place before a deadline?
This depends on the complexity of the systems involved, but most assessments and initial implementations can be completed within a few weeks once started.

See What a Documented Plan Would Look Like

Fidalia can assess your current backup practices against what your audit, regulator, or insurer is actually asking for.

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