When systems go down, the question isn’t just whether you have backups. It’s whether you can recover quickly and whether stakeholders across your organization know where you stand before an incident happens.

This checklist helps teams assess data protection readiness across five critical areas and provides a framework for communicating resilience status to everyone who needs it.

The assessment covers:

• Backup and recovery foundations, cyber resilience, and storage optimization
• Continuity automation and documented recovery playbooks
• Governance reporting and leadership confidence metrics
• Practical scoring to measure current readiness and track progress

How to communicate your findings:

• Up: Brief leadership on recovery readiness, downtime costs, and budget priorities
• Down: Give IT staff clear roles, playbooks, and status during recovery events
• In: Align internally across security, operations, and infrastructure teams
• Out: Update constituents, vendors, and external stakeholders during incidents

Built for infrastructure, security, and IT operations teams responsible for protecting critical systems and maintaining stakeholder confidence during disruptions.