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title: Readiness, Maintained
description: Between incidents we keep an up-to-date map of your infrastructure and a response plan that tracks your changes — so when something fails, the response is measured in minutes instead of starting from scratch.
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Readiness is the continuous work that precedes any incident: a current map of the infrastructure and a response plan that is kept aligned with the system as it changes. Its purpose is to relocate the most expensive part of an outage — the responder's reconstruction of an unfamiliar environment — out of the moment of crisis and into a period of calm, where it can be done accurately and without pressure.

The value of the service lies less in a discrete deliverable than in a maintained condition: at any given time, the infrastructure is already understood, and the appropriate response to the failure of any given part of it is already established. Without this, response begins from a system last understood at some earlier point, which is often no longer the system that has failed.

The service is the foundation beneath incident response, and it is remunerated during periods when nothing is failing — which is the nature of preparedness rather than a peculiarity of it.

Its depth should be specified explicitly. At minimum it comprises a current map and a current plan. More rigorous practice — rehearsed failure exercises, structured drills — constitutes an extension of the service and is not implied by the baseline.