Business continuity and disaster recovery planning are two essential aspects of ensuring the resilience and reliability of any software application. Business continuity planning refers to the process of identifying and mitigating the potential threats and risks that could disrupt the normal operation of an app, such as power outages, cyberattacks, natural disasters, or human errors. Disaster recovery refers to the process of restoring the app’s functionality and data after a disruption, using predefined procedures and backup resources.

App developers need to have a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy in place to ensure that their apps can withstand and recover from any unforeseen event and minimize the impact on their customers and stakeholders.

Conducting a business impact analysis is crucial to identify the critical functions and processes of the app, their dependencies, and the resources required to support them. This includes determining the maximum acceptable downtime and data loss for each function and process.

Defining the recovery objectives and strategies, such as the recovery point objective (the maximum amount of data that can be lost without compromising the app’s integrity) and the recovery time objective (the maximum amount of time the app can be offline without affecting its availability) is important in establishing a backup and restore plan for the app’s data and configuration.

Developing a contingency plan for the app’s infrastructure and operations may involve preparing alternative hosting platforms, network connections, power sources, and staff roles, ensuring that the plan is compatible with the app’s architecture and performance requirements.

Providing clear instructions on how to activate, execute, and terminate the plan in case of an emergency and updating the business continuity and disaster recovery plans periodically is vital. This includes considering changes in the app’s features, functions, environment, or requirements, and conducting regular disaster recovery exercises to test and improve the plan’s efficiency and readiness.

Microsoft 365 Certification verifies business continuity and disaster recovery plans are in place

During Microsoft 365 Certification, app developers provide evidence that their apps have robust business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place. This includes details of relevant personnel, their roles and responsibilities, as well as business functions with associated contingency requirements and objectives. System and data backup procedures, configuration, and scheduling/retention must be clearly outlined, along with recovery priority and timeframe targets.

Auditors will verify that contingency plans outline the necessary actions, steps, and procedures to restore critical business functions and services during unexpected interruptions. With reviews of established processes for fully restoring the system to its original state, along with documentation on disaster recovery exercises, including any lessons learned or organizational changes implemented.

Microsoft 365 Certification verifies that business continuity and disaster recovery plans are in place, demonstrating compliance with industry standards and best practices.

This control set is partially automated using ACAT, The App Compliance Automation Tool. ACAT is a service within the Azure portal designed to ease the path to compliance for applications using Microsoft 365 customer data and published through Partner Center. ACAT also allows continuous compliance monitoring with customized daily reports.

Next steps

To learn more on how Microsoft 365 Certification validates business continuity and disaster recovery plans are in place for your application, visit the sample evidence guide.

To start certification, go to the Microsoft Partner Center dashboard, select an app from Marketplace offers overview, and select App Compliance.