How do you build a resilience or outage plan during onboarding?

Resilience planning during onboarding focuses on prevention, preparedness and recoverability, rather than reactive response. It all begins during the current state assessment.

This includes:

• Identifying critical services, systems and dependencies
• Understanding single points of failure
• Reviewing existing resilience, backup and recovery capabilities
• Assessing the impact of outages on users and operations

This establishes a clear view of where resilience controls are required.

Documenting architecture, configurations and dependencies

To support resilience and recovery, Espria ensures key information is documented during onboarding.

This may include:

• Environment and service diagrams
• Configuration baselines
• Asset and dependency inventories
• Third-party and vendor dependencies

Clear documentation enables faster diagnosis and recovery during incidents.

Designing failover and recovery approaches

Where resilience, failover or immutable backups are in scope, Espria works with customers to define appropriate recovery approaches.

This may include:

• Identifying failover options for critical services
• Defining recovery priorities and sequencing
• Aligning backup and restore capabilities to business impact
• Confirming recovery responsibilities and escalation routes

Approaches are proportionate to risk, criticality and service scope.

Testing and validation during onboarding

Resilience planning is validated through testing where appropriate.

This may include:

• Backup and restore validation
• Failover or recovery walkthroughs
• Scenario-based tabletop exercises
• Verification of monitoring and alerting coverage

Testing ensures plans are practical and executable, not theoretical.

Integrating resilience into onboarding governance

Resilience and outage planning is governed alongside other onboarding activities.

This ensures:

• Risks related to resilience are logged and tracked
• Gaps are addressed before go-live where possible
• Acceptance decisions are made with full visibility of residual risk

Resilience readiness forms part of go-live acceptance criteria.

Transitioning resilience planning into BAU

Once onboarding completes, resilience planning does not stop.

Relevant artefacts are handed into BAU delivery, including:

• Documentation and diagrams
• Recovery priorities and contacts
• Improvement actions or future resilience enhancements

This ensures resilience remains actively managed post-transition.

Key takeaway

Espria builds resilience and outage planning into onboarding from the outset — through assessment, documentation, design and validation.

By ensuring recovery and failover considerations are addressed before services go live, we reduce downtime risk and provide confidence that services can be recovered quickly and safely if incidents occur.

Related questions

• How do you identify and mitigate risks during onboarding?
• What rollback or contingency procedures exist if something fails?
• What are the acceptance and sign-off criteria to declare transition complete?