01
The hardware-bound licence
Software whose licence is tied to a network card or a machine identifier. Restored elsewhere, it starts and then stops. Sorting it out depends on a vendor who answers in business days.
Scenario
What blocks a recovery is almost never on the diagram.
Architecture inventories describe servers and applications. Recoveries fail on what is not in them: a licence, a certificate, an account, a provider unreachable on a Sunday.
Three classic blockers
These are the ones we meet most often at a first drill.
02
The certificate that expires at the wrong moment
An internal certificate stored only on the system being restored, or expired during the outage. The application restarts but refuses connections, and diagnosing it takes hours.
03
The third party nobody told
An essential service hosted with a provider whose contract says nothing about recovery on your side, or whose support is only reachable in business hours when the outage happens on a Friday evening.
How they get found
Not by reading the documentation, because these items are never in it. By restoring for real, onto a separate environment, and noting every time something does not start.
A first drill on one priority service typically surfaces between five and fifteen gaps of this kind. That is normal, it is the point, and it is precisely what you do not want to discover on the day of an incident.
Each gap is recorded with an owner and a deadline. The next drill checks that they are closed. It is the gap register that moves the framework forward, not the writing of the plan.
What we inventory beyond the servers
| Item | Why | What is recorded |
|---|---|---|
| Licences | Can block a start-up elsewhere | Binding method, vendor contact, time to regularise |
| Certificates | Expire, or live on the system you lost | Location, expiry, reissue procedure |
| Service accounts | Often personal and undocumented | Owner, scope, replacement procedure |
| Third-party providers | Their availability conditions yours | Contractual commitments, support channel and hours |
| Outbound traffic | Recovery changes addresses and breaks access | Address-based filtering at your partners |
Request an assessment
Start by knowing where you stand
Tell us which applications you cannot lose, how long you could hold out without them, and when a restore was last actually tested. We reply within two working days.
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Tell us when a restore was last tested. If the answer is “never”, let’s start there.
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