What Is ResOps
ResOps, short for Resilience Operations, is the practice of running organisational resilience as a continuous, operational discipline rather than a periodic plan, by continuously proving that critical business services can keep running, or can be restored successfully, within a tolerance the business has agreed it can absorb.
The purpose of this page
ResOps is a concept that has sprung up recently and it’s gaining traction fast. We don’t claim to have invented it, although we wish we had – it’s one of those ideas that just makes sense. ResOps will quickly become very important for all medium to large enterprises – but today, most of the information available about ResOps is conceptual.
This page aims to provide answers to practical questions about ResOps – where it came from, how it differs from disaster recovery and business continuity, what its core components are, how it is measured, and how organisations put it into practice.
The shift from ‘traditional’ resilience to ResOps
In most organisations, resilience is considered within the context of infrequent disruptive events that must be prepared for. ResOps treats resilience as a normal operating condition to manage. It applies the same shift to resilience that SecOps applied to security and DevOps applied to software delivery: turning an occasional, project-based activity into something that runs continuously, is measured, and strives for continuous improvement over time.
A ResOps definition
Resilience Operations (ResOps) unifies data protection, security, and recovery around the continuity of critical business services. Rather than asking only “how fast can we recover,” ResOps asks “how much disruption can the business absorb, and can we prove we will stay within that limit.” It is an operating model in which recoverability is continuously validated, clean recovery is verified in advance, and resilience is measured as an ongoing operational capability rather than assumed from the existence of a plan.
If ResOps is the operating model, Recovery Assurance is the discipline that delivers it. Recovery Assurance is the continuous, automated practice of validating that critical systems can be restored cleanly and completely before they are needed, and it produces the evidence, the Proof of Recovery, that demonstrates resilience is real rather than assumed. ResOps sets the objective; Recovery Assurance is how that objective is met in practice.
The term ResOps is being adopted across the data protection and cyber resilience industry to describe this move from planning-based resilience to continuous operational practice.
Why ResOps emerged
Three pressures broke the old model of resilience.
Disruption now moves at machine speed. Ransomware, cloud and SaaS complexity, identity sprawl, third-party dependencies, and AI agents acting on enterprise data in milliseconds mean that incidents propagate faster than manual, plan-based response can keep up with.
Resilience was siloed. Security, IT operations, and recovery teams have historically worked independently, each optimising within its own domain. This creates duplication, inconsistent controls, and blind spots that only surface during a real incident, when the cost of discovering them is highest.
Recoverability was assumed, not proven. Backups complete, immutability is configured, a recovery plan is documented, and everyone moves on. But a successful backup is not a successful recovery, and a documented plan is not a tested one. The gap between believing you can recover and being able to prove it tends to stay invisible until disruption makes it visible.
ResOps is the response to all three: an operating discipline designed to work through failure and continuously prove recoverability, rather than a set of tools and plans held in reserve.
How ResOps differs from disaster recovery and BCDR
ResOps does not replace disaster recovery (DR) or business continuity (BCDR). It changes how they operate.
Disaster recovery focuses on restoring systems and infrastructure after an incident. Business continuity focuses on keeping business processes running during one. Both have traditionally been periodic and plan-centric: a documented runbook, an annual test, an assumption that the plan will hold when needed.
ResOps shifts three things:
From periodic to continuous. Recovery is validated on an ongoing basis, not tested once a year in a tabletop exercise that may not reflect the current environment.
From restoring infrastructure to restoring trusted services. The goal is not just to bring systems back online, but to confirm the data being restored is complete, consistent, and free from corruption or malware before it re-enters production.
From recovery time to impact tolerance. Instead of asking only how quickly a system can be restored, ResOps asks how much disruption a critical business service can absorb, and requires evidence that recovery will stay within that defined limit.
In short, DR and BCDR define what should happen when something breaks. ResOps continuously proves that it will.
The core components of ResOps
Most descriptions of ResOps converge on a closed loop of capabilities centred on critical business services rather than individual tools.
Discover and protect. Know what data and services exist, where they reside, how they are used, and what depends on them.
Detect and respond. Identify degradation or compromise early and respond in a coordinated way across security, IT, and recovery, rather than in separate, uncoordinated workflows.
Validate and prove. Continuously test that recovery paths work against the current architecture, exposing hidden dependencies and reducing reliance on undocumented knowledge held by specific individuals. This is the domain of Recovery Assurance: the practice that turns “we should be able to recover” into documented Proof of Recovery.
Recover clean. Restore services, not just infrastructure, and verify that restored data is clean and usable before it is reintroduced. In a cyber incident this is critical: restoring compromised data can restart the attack.
Continuous improvement. Feed verified, trusted data and lessons back into operations, closing the loop so resilience strengthens over time rather than degrading between annual reviews.
The defining feature is that these are operational activities running continuously, not stages in a one-off plan.
How ResOps is measured
ResOps introduces and elevates metrics that go beyond traditional recovery measures.
Mean Time to Clean Recovery (MTCR). An emerging metric that measures the time to restore a clean, trusted, usable service, not simply the time to bring a system back online. MTCR is increasingly seen as more meaningful than recovery time alone, because a fast restore of compromised data is not a real recovery.
RTO and RPO. Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective remain useful, but ResOps treats them as necessary rather than sufficient. They describe speed and data loss, not whether the recovered data is trustworthy.
Impact tolerance. The maximum level of disruption a critical business service can absorb, expressed in time, capacity, or other thresholds. ResOps treats staying within impact tolerance as the headline outcome, with other metrics feeding into it.
Proof of Recovery. Continuous Recovery Assurance produces timestamped, repeatable evidence that recovery actually works, what restored cleanly, what did not, and how long it took. This Proof of Recovery can be presented to boards and regulators as demonstrable evidence rather than assertion, and is the tangible output that distinguishes an operating ResOps model from a documented intention.
How organisations operationalise ResOps
The strategy of ResOps is widely agreed. The harder question is how to run it in practice, particularly in real environments that rarely look like the clean diagrams in a strategy deck. The answer, operationally, is Recovery Assurance: the continuous, automated practice of proving recoverability across the estate. Recovery Assurance is what makes ResOps an operation rather than an aspiration, and three realities determine whether it works.
Recoverability has to be proven continuously, not assumed. The only reliable way to know a system will come back is to restore it and test it, repeatedly and automatically, rather than trusting that completed backups equal successful recoveries. Each test produces a fresh Proof of Recovery rather than a one-off, ageing assumption.
Clean recovery has to be a verified mechanic, not a slogan. Immutability protects a copy from being changed, but does nothing to confirm that copy was clean when written. Dormant malware frequently sits inside backups. Catching it requires more than anomaly detection: it means restoring the workload, scanning it properly to confirm whether an infection is real, and cleaning it where necessary before it returns to production.
Coverage has to span the real estate. Most organisations run several backup and storage platforms, and vendor-specific resilience tooling typically validates only that vendor’s own data. A ResOps model that works on a single vendor’s stack leaves blind spots in exactly the places incidents tend to appear. Genuine Recovery Assurance is vendor-agnostic across the environment an organisation actually runs.
There is also a persistent misconception that resilience operations require enterprise-scale, capital-heavy infrastructure. In practice, organisations get further by starting with a minimum viable business service, a single critical application or workload group, establishing Recovery Assurance there, and expanding. That is what makes ResOps an operation you begin now and run continuously, rather than a transformation you wait to fund.
Where Predatar fits
Predatar operationalises the part of ResOps that most of the conversation talks around: Recovery Assurance, the continuous, automated proof of recovery across multi-vendor environments. Predatar’s CleanRoom automatically restores backups and primary snapshots into isolation, tests that they come back clean and usable, and scans for and removes malware as part of the process, without manual effort. It works across Veeam, Rubrik, Cohesity, IBM Storage Protect, IBM FlashSystem, and Pure Storage from a single, centralised platform, and deploys as a virtual appliance into infrastructure organisations already own. Every test produces Proof of Recovery: evidence of exactly what will restore, cleanly and completely, when it matters. In short, Predatar delivers the Recovery Assurance that turns ResOps from a principle into a daily, measurable operation.
Frequently asked questions
What does ResOps stand for?
ResOps stands for Resilience Operations. It describes running organisational resilience as a continuous operational discipline rather than a periodic plan.
What is ResOps in simple terms?
ResOps is the practice of continuously proving that an organisation’s critical services can keep running, or be restored cleanly, when disruption occurs, rather than assuming a documented recovery plan will work when needed.
How is ResOps different from disaster recovery?
Disaster recovery focuses on restoring systems after an incident and is typically periodic and plan-based. ResOps is continuous, focuses on restoring trusted services rather than just infrastructure, and measures success against the level of disruption a business can absorb (impact tolerance) rather than recovery speed alone.
What is Mean Time to Clean Recovery (MTCR)?
MTCR measures the time to restore a clean, trusted, usable service, not just the time to bring a system back online. It is emerging as a more meaningful resilience metric than recovery time alone, because restoring compromised data is not a genuine recovery.
Why is ResOps becoming important now?
Disruption from ransomware, cloud and SaaS complexity, and AI agents acting on data at machine speed has outpaced traditional, plan-based resilience. ResOps responds by making resilience a continuous, measurable operation designed to work through failure rather than a plan held in reserve.
Does ResOps replace backup, BCDR, or disaster recovery?
No. ResOps builds on them. It changes how they operate, from periodic and assumed to continuous and proven, rather than replacing the underlying capabilities.
How does an organisation start with ResOps?
The most effective approach is to start small, by establishing Recovery Assurance for a single critical business service or workload group, then expanding across the environment over time, rather than attempting an enterprise-wide transformation at once.
What is Recovery Assurance and how does it relate to ResOps?
Recovery Assurance is the continuous, automated practice of validating that critical systems can be restored cleanly and completely before they are needed. It is the operational core of ResOps: where ResOps is the operating model that makes resilience continuous, Recovery Assurance is the discipline that delivers it and produces the evidence that it works.
What is Proof of Recovery?
Proof of Recovery is the timestamped, repeatable evidence that recovery actually works, generated by continuous Recovery Assurance testing. It records what restored cleanly, what did not, and how long it took, providing boards and regulators with demonstrable evidence of resilience rather than an untested assumption. Proof of Recovery is the tangible output that distinguishes an operating ResOps model from a documented plan.
