Who owns the handoff between your backup and recovery vendors?

Backups and disaster recovery are separate strategies, but relying on separate vendors to deliver them creates gaps in responsibility. Too many organizations assume having daily data backups means they have disaster recovery. In reality, a backup stores file copies, while disaster recovery provides the standby servers, network orchestration, and operational timelines required to get a bank running again. You need both strategies, but splitting them across two vendors doubles your operational overhead, inflates costs, and leaves neither vendor to own the end-to-end recovery path.

Under FFIEC Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) rules, using different vendors for backup and recovery forces your risk team to execute duplicate SOC 2 audit reviews, negotiate separate contracts, track two sets of vendor ratings, and reconcile conflicting Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Multi-vendor setups leave recovery gaps

Multi-vendor setups that separate backup and disaster recovery create an unassigned gap in responsibility. The backup contract covers storing files, while the disaster recovery contract covers hosting standby servers. Neither vendor is obligated to coordinate with the other during an outage. Internal bank IT teams must bridge this gap during a crisis. Three operational scenarios demonstrate where this multi-vendor structure fails:

1. Declaring the disaster
   Declaring the disaster rests exclusively with your leadership team. Once you formally declare a disaster, your IT team must choose whether to restore data or fail over to standby infrastructure. Because neither vendor owns that decision or coordinates cross-vendor execution, internal IT teams must manage the recovery path without extra support.
2. Ransomware reaches the standby copy too
   Ransomware and untested fallback occurs when an attack locks your files and the corrupted data copies automatically sync into your disaster recovery environment. Because the recovery environment now holds infected data, you can’t restore bank operations. Your team must abandon disaster recovery and resort to loading older, offline backups instead, which involves a secondary recovery path that neither vendor supports and your bank has never tested.
3. Neither contract covers the failback
   Unowned failback happens after operating in your disaster recovery environment and needing to switch back to your main systems. Returning to normal requires your team to match and sync every transaction logged during the outage across both platforms. Because this transition spans both vendors' systems, neither vendor includes failback support in their contract.

Examiners evaluate your recovery readiness

Examiners evaluate your recovery readiness by testing if your bank can restore its systems within the specific timeframes promised in your compliance documents: your Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which dictates how many minutes of transaction data loss your bank can tolerate, and your Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which sets the maximum hours your systems can stay down.

When your bank uses two separate vendors, FFIEC, OCC, and FDIC examiners compare the emergency instruction manuals, known as a runbook, from both providers. Because these two manuals are updated separately, changes made to your daily backup system don’t automatically transfer to your disaster recovery system. During an inspection, examiners uncover the mismatched runbooks, missing passwords, and broken network connections. These errors prove that your bank can’t successfully switch to backup systems during a crisis. As a result, your risk committee is forced to spend extra staff hours collecting separate activity reports and managing double the vendor audits to satisfy regulatory requirements.

Unifying backup and disaster recovery

Unifying backup and disaster recovery solutions ensures one vendor manages your entire recovery architecture from end to end. While backup and disaster recovery remain distinct operational functions, having a single provider eliminates cross-vendor friction, reduces operational overhead, and simplifies compliance. One vendor owns the switchover and failback, so there’s no point where responsibility has to pass from one provider to another. The whole recovery, from the backup itself through the moment you’re back on your own systems, can be tested as one sequence and recorded in one place.

To evaluate whether your current setup leaves your bank exposed, have your risk committee answer these three questions:

1. Are we managing separate TPRM reviews and contracts for our backup vendor and disaster recovery vendor?
2. Who owns the SLA for moving us back from the standby systems to our own after an outage?
3. Can our compliance team produce an audit log today that proves both RPO and RTO to examiners?

These questions have a short answer when one vendor owns the whole path.