The Challenge

RedRock partnered with NHS Property Services to assess and strengthen its disaster recovery (DR) capability across a large and complex technology estate.

NHS Property Services (NHSPS) manages around 3,000 NHS buildings across England, supporting frontline healthcare delivery through safe, sustainable and well-managed estates. With technology underpinning many critical services, NHSPS needed greater confidence in how it would respond to and recover from major disruption.

RedRock was engaged to carry out a structured discovery and planning exercise, resulting in a clear Disaster Recovery strategy, roadmap, and a practical DR runbook that could be reused across the organisation.

NHSPS recognised that it lacked a clear view of its disaster recovery risks and preparedness. There were no documented DR runbooks or recovery procedures in place, and limited understanding of how different disaster scenarios could impact systems, services, locations, or users.

This created a significant risk to operational continuity should a major incident occur, particularly given the scale and criticality of the services NHSPS supports.

NHSPS needed to:

• Understand where it was most exposed from a disaster recovery perspective
• Identify priority areas for remediation
• Define a clear, practical approach to responding to and recovering from major incidents
• Create repeatable recovery plans that internal teams could own and evolve

 

Our Approach

RedRock proposed and delivered a structured engagement split into two clear phases: Discovery and Disaster Recovery Planning. A small, focused team, comprising an Enterprise Solution Architect and a Delivery Manager, worked closely with NHSPS stakeholders using an agile, iterative approach with regular checkpoints and feedback loops.

Phase 1: Discovery and Risk Assessment

The discovery phase focused on building a clear, evidence-based understanding of the existing technology estate and its recovery risks.

We began by:

• Refining the problem statement and confirming scope
• Mapping stakeholders and agreeing deliverables
• Establishing a RAID log to track risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies
• Our team then reviewed existing documentation and created structured catalogues covering:
• Applications
• Infrastructure
• Services
• Interfaces and dependencies

Through targeted stakeholder interviews, we enriched these catalogues with critical information such as system importance, user volumes, recovery expectations, and technical dependencies. This enabled us to identify high-risk areas and visualise vulnerabilities using dashboards and architecture diagrams.

The discovery phase concluded with a clear assessment report, outlining key risks, strengths, and prioritised recommendations to improve disaster recovery and business continuity.

Phase 2: Disaster Recovery Strategy and Planning

Building on the discovery findings, RedRock developed a practical and achievable Disaster Recovery strategy tailored to NHSPS.

This included:

• A clear DR vision and objectives
• A target recovery architecture
• A prioritised remediation roadmap aligned to risk and impact
• Defined activities NHSPS could deliver over time

At the centre of this phase was the creation of a detailed Disaster Recovery Runbook for one of NHSPS’s largest and most business-critical applications. This executable response plan set out step-by-step guidance for responding to a range of disaster scenarios, including:

• Backup and recovery processes
• Restoration workflows
• Testing and validation activities
• Roles, responsibilities and checklists

The runbook was deliberately designed as a reusable blueprint, enabling NHSPS teams to create similar recovery plans for other systems and services.

 

Outcomes and Impact

The engagement delivered a clear set of tangible outputs and long-term value for NHSPS, including:

• Full visibility of disaster recovery risks and system dependencies
• A practical, organisation-wide DR strategy and roadmap
• A tested, stakeholder-reviewed DR runbook for a critical system
• Reusable application and infrastructure catalogues to support future architecture and planning work
• Increased confidence and readiness to respond to major incidents

The project was completed in 14 weeks and delivered within the original contract value.

 

Why This Matters

This case study shows how a focused discovery-led approach can quickly strengthen an organisation’s disaster recovery posture, without disruption or over-engineering.

By combining clear risk insight with practical, executable plans, RedRock helped NHS Property Services move from uncertainty to confidence, laying the foundations for resilient, repeatable disaster recovery across a complex NHS technology estate.