Business Continuity & Recovery
This document describes the business continuity and recovery characteristics of Boxcurve Unity for the customer's IT continuity and procurement reviewers. It separates the capabilities that are evidenced in the application from the objectives and commitments that are either inherited from the underlying Microsoft platform or defined in the customer's agreement with Boxcurve.
Scope
Boxcurve Unity is a Power Platform application that runs inside the customer's own Microsoft 365 tenant and stores its data in the customer's Microsoft Dataverse. The continuity posture described here is therefore a combination of inherited platform capabilities, application-level recovery features that Unity provides, and recovery objectives defined in the customer's agreement with Boxcurve. Recovery time and recovery point objectives are governed by the Microsoft platform and that agreement rather than by the application.
Summary of responsibilities
| Area | Provided by |
|---|---|
| Data durability, platform backup, high availability | Microsoft (inherited through Dataverse) |
| In-product project backup and restore | Boxcurve Unity |
| Re-deployment of the application into an environment | Boxcurve Unity (managed solution package) |
| Continued operation if the licensing service is unreachable | Boxcurve Unity (fails open) |
| Recovery time / recovery point objectives, retention beyond the platform default, service-continuity commitments for the licensing service | Inherited from the Microsoft platform, with any application-specific objectives defined in your Boxcurve agreement |
Inherited platform durability and availability
Boxcurve Unity stores all of its operational data, projects, tasks, accountability assignments, stakeholder records, comments, change history, and settings, in the customer's Microsoft Dataverse environment. Because the data resides in Dataverse, the durability of that data, the underlying backup of the platform, and the high availability of the service are provided and operated by Microsoft as part of the Power Platform service. Boxcurve Unity does not replace, override, or supplement these platform-level protections.
The customer should review and rely on Microsoft's published continuity and recovery posture for the Power Platform and Dataverse, including platform backups, restore options, and availability:
- Power Platform and Dataverse continuity and business-continuity guidance: https://learn.microsoft.com/power-platform/admin/business-continuity-disaster-recovery
- Microsoft's audited continuity and resilience documentation is available through the Microsoft Service Trust Portal: https://servicetrust.microsoft.com/
This document does not restate how the Microsoft platform performs backup, replication, or failover internally. Those mechanisms are owned and documented by Microsoft. The customer inherits them by virtue of running Boxcurve Unity in a Power Platform environment.
Application-level recovery: project backup and restore
In addition to the platform-level protections above, Boxcurve Unity provides an in-product Backup and Restore capability for projects, operated from the Administration Dashboard by an administrator.
- Backup captures a project so that a recoverable copy of it exists within the application. A backed-up project is held as a distinct backup copy alongside the customer's active projects.
- Restore re-creates a project from one of these backups.
This is a genuine application-level recovery feature: it allows an administrator to protect an individual project before a significant change, and to recover that project from its backup if required.
Scope of the backup and restore feature
The in-product Backup and Restore capability operates at the level of an individual project within the application. It is not a substitute for the platform-level backup, restore, and disaster-recovery provided by Microsoft for the Dataverse environment as a whole, and it should not be relied upon as a full disaster-recovery mechanism. Use it to protect and recover individual projects; rely on the inherited Microsoft platform capabilities for environment-level recovery.
Backup and restore actions are available only to administrative roles and are performed from within the application; see the Administrator Guide for who can perform them.
Recovering the application itself
Boxcurve Unity is delivered to the customer as a managed solution package. Because the application is packaged this way, the application itself, its screens, automated processes, data tables, and security roles, can be re-deployed or restored into a Power Platform environment from the supplied package. This means that recovery of the application is distinct from recovery of the data: the data is protected through Dataverse and the project backup feature described above, while the application can be re-installed from its package.
Updates and re-deployments of the application follow a controlled process in which changes are validated in a non-production (sandbox) environment before being applied to production. For the details of how versions are packaged, delivered, and validated, and what the customer should review after an update, see Updates & Change Management.
Continued operation if the licensing service is unreachable
Boxcurve Unity performs a licensing check against a licensing service operated by Boxcurve. This licensing service is the only Boxcurve-operated dependency that the in-tenant application contacts.
The application's licensing check fails open. If the Boxcurve licensing service is unreachable, the application continues to operate: it relies on a locally held copy of the licence and proceeds, rather than blocking access. As a result, an interruption to the Boxcurve licensing service does not stop the in-tenant application from functioning, and does not prevent users from working with their projects, tasks, and accountability data held in the customer's Dataverse.
This fail-open behaviour is a deliberate continuity strength: continued availability of the application does not depend on the continued availability of any Boxcurve-operated service.
The licensing service is used to confirm the customer's plan and to surface update notifications. Its unavailability affects those functions only; it does not affect the application's core operation.
Recovery objectives and commitments
The following objectives are not set by the application itself. They are inherited from the Microsoft platform or defined in the customer's agreement with Boxcurve, as set out below. The customer's continuity reviewer should align each one with their own Power Platform environment arrangements and their Boxcurve agreement.
| Item | Where it is defined |
|---|---|
| Recovery Time Objective (RTO) | Inherited from the Microsoft platform; any application-specific objective is defined in your Boxcurve agreement |
| Recovery Point Objective (RPO) | Inherited from the Microsoft platform; any application-specific objective is defined in your Boxcurve agreement |
| Backup frequency and retention beyond the platform default | Inherited from the Microsoft platform; any additional commitment is defined in your Boxcurve agreement |
| Availability target for the application | Inherited from the Microsoft platform for the in-tenant application; defined in your agreement for any Boxcurve-operated service |
| Service-continuity commitment for the Boxcurve licensing service | Defined in your agreement with Boxcurve |
Because Boxcurve Unity runs in the customer's own tenant and stores its data in the customer's Dataverse, the platform-level continuity and recovery objectives that apply are those of the customer's own Power Platform environment. The customer's continuity reviewer should align Unity's recovery expectations with the customer's existing Dataverse environment continuity arrangements.
Recommended continuity practices for the customer
The following practices help the customer apply Unity's recovery features effectively. They are recommendations, not commitments.
- Use the in-product project Backup before performing significant administrative changes to a project, so that the project can be restored from its backup if needed.
- Validate application updates in a non-production environment before applying them to production, in line with the process described in Updates & Change Management.
- Confirm the platform-level backup, restore, and disaster-recovery arrangements for the customer's Dataverse environment with the customer's Power Platform administrators, and align Unity's recovery expectations with them.
- Agree the recovery time and recovery point objectives, and any service-continuity expectations for the Boxcurve licensing service, directly with Boxcurve.