Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

1. Backups

• Point-in-time recovery on the primary database with 7-day rewind.
• Full daily snapshots retained for 30 days.
• Weekly encrypted snapshots retained for 12 months in a separate region.
• Financial records (invoices, payments, receipts, credit notes, audit log) are retained for 7 years per Kenya Revenue Authority requirements — they are never hard-deleted, even after a tenant is offboarded.

2. Recovery objectives

3. Provider failover

Karo runs a provider-abstraction layer for every third-party dependency:

• Payments: a primary online processor with a manual bank-transfer plus maker-checker settlement path always available as a fallback.
• SMS: a primary carrier with automatic failover to a secondary carrier on error.
• Email: a primary transactional provider with automatic failover to a secondary provider on prolonged bounce.
• Identity: a pluggable adapter layer that can be repointed to a different verification provider by rotating one secret — no code changes required.

4. Data escrow & offboarding

Any school may request a full JSON export of its operational and financial records at any time; the platform owner can also produce it on request from the console (audit log entry school.offboard.export). On offboarding, the tenant is frozen — financial records remain in read-only storage for the statutory retention period; operational records are retained per the Privacy Policy schedule.

5. Testing

Karo runs a documented restore drill quarterly (restore a snapshot to a staging environment and verify integrity) and a tabletop incident exercise twice a year.

6. Contact

Incident hotline: +254 704 703 291. Email: info@karoschool.net.