Designing a Global BCDR Strategy for Crown Jewel Applications

Client: Large Global Venture Capital Organization Industry: Financial Services / Venture Capital

 

Challenge

The client operated globally with multiple business-critical platforms supporting investment operations, portfolio monitoring, internal collaboration, finance, investor reporting, and decision-making. However, business continuity and disaster recovery practices were not consistently defined across all crown jewel applications.

There was limited clarity on application criticality, recovery priorities, dependencies, recovery time expectations, and ownership during disruption scenarios. Given the global nature of the business, any extended downtime could impact investment operations, stakeholder confidence, and regulatory expectations.

Approach

ACG started by identifying and classifying all crown jewel applications based on business criticality, operational dependency, user impact, data sensitivity, and recovery priority. We conducted stakeholder workshops across technology, business, security, and operations teams to understand business impact scenarios.

We then defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), dependency maps, failover expectations, backup requirements, and recovery ownership for each critical application. Automation opportunities were identified for backup validation, recovery testing, alerting, and failover orchestration.

Solution

ACG developed a global BCDR strategy covering governance, application classification, recovery architecture, crisis response, communication flow, DR testing approach, and executive reporting. The framework was designed to be practical, testable, and scalable across regions.

Results

🛡️ 100% coverage of identified crown jewel applications ⚡ 50% improvement in recovery preparedness 🔁 Automated backup and recovery validation roadmap created 📊 Executive-ready BCDR dashboard and reporting structure defined