Every hour a core system stays down costs a business real money and, often, customer trust – yet many organisations only discover their backups do not actually restore properly during the outage itself. The IT Disaster Recovery and Backup Strategy Training Course by Arab British Fellowship Training Academy starts from that uncomfortable truth: a backup is not a recovery plan until someone has proven it can be restored under pressure.

Positioned within the Information Technology and Programming Courses category, the programme works through business impact analysis, recovery time and recovery point objectives, backup design, rotation and retention, replication and failover, cloud and hybrid recovery, and – critically – the restore testing that confirms all of it actually works. It closes by connecting IT recovery to wider business continuity, cyber incident recovery, and the governance needed to keep recovery arrangements current as systems and priorities change.

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Identify critical IT services and data, and translate business impact into measurable recovery requirements.
• Define recovery time and recovery point objectives appropriate to each system's operational importance.
• Design a backup strategy – on-site, off-site, cloud, or hybrid – matched to data criticality.
• Establish backup rotation, retention, and lifecycle management practices.
• Evaluate replication and failover options for reducing service interruption.
• Apply recovery considerations specific to cloud and hybrid technology environments.
• Design and run restore-testing exercises that validate recovery capability rather than assume it.
• Document recovery procedures, responsibilities, and escalation paths so they can be followed under pressure.
• Align IT disaster recovery with wider business continuity planning.
• Apply recovery considerations specific to cyber incidents, including compromised or corrupted data.
• Use governance, metrics, and periodic review to keep recovery arrangements current.

Target Audience

• IT managers, infrastructure managers, and technology directors.
• Systems administrators, network engineers, and technical support professionals.
• Cybersecurity teams responsible for post-incident resilience.
• Business continuity managers, risk professionals, and crisis management teams.
• Database administrators, cloud specialists, and technology architects.
• IT operations, service management, and technology project or programme managers.

Module 1: What Downtime Actually Costs the Business

• Common sources of disruption: infrastructure failure, cyber incidents, human error.
• The relationship between disaster recovery, resilience, and business continuity.
• Critical business services and the technology dependencies behind them.

Module 2: Business Impact Analysis and Recovery Requirements

• Identifying critical applications, infrastructure, and information assets.
• Consequences of prolonged interruption for different services.
• Setting recovery priorities based on operational dependencies.

Module 3: Setting Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives

• Defining a recovery time objective for each critical technology service.
• Recovery point requirements and their link to backup frequency.
• How these objectives shape backup design and infrastructure choices.

Module 4: Designing a Backup Strategy That Fits the Business

• Backup types, scheduling, and data classification.
• Matching backup arrangements to business criticality rather than a single approach.
• Protection requirements and operational responsibilities.

Module 5: Rotation, Retention and Long-Term Backup Management

• Rotation models and retention policies.
• Media, storage, and off-site protection considerations.
• Supporting recovery from accidental deletion and longer-term incidents.

Module 6: Replication and Failover Architecture

• Synchronisation, latency, and data-consistency considerations.
• Failover systems, redundancy, and standby environments.
• Determining which services justify high-availability arrangements.

Module 7: Recovery in Cloud and Hybrid Environments

• Cloud backup, replicated workloads, and recovery environments.
• Access dependencies and configuration protection.
• Security requirements for restoration across hybrid infrastructure.

Module 8: Proving Backups Work – Restore Testing and Validation

• Designing realistic file, application, and database restoration tests.
• Test frequency, documentation, and issue tracking.
• Turning lessons learned into corrective action.

Module 9: Documenting Recovery So People Can Follow It Under Pressure

• Roles, responsibilities, dependencies, and escalation paths.
• Recovery sequencing, contact arrangements, and system priorities.
• Keeping documentation practical, accessible, and current.

Module 10: Cyber Incident Recovery and Data Integrity

• Recovering from compromised systems without reintroducing risk.
• Protected backups, isolation requirements, and validation before returning to production.
• Ensuring recovery resources remain trustworthy after an attack.

Module 11: Continuity Integration, Exercises and Governance

• Connecting IT recovery to a broader business continuity plan.
• Scenario-based exercises, tabletop drills, and cross-functional coordination.
• Recovery metrics, control reviews, and periodic reassessment of objectives.