Disaster Recovery Plan

A disaster recovery plan is the written plan for recovering IT systems and data after a major disruption — a data center loss, a ransomware attack, a catastrophic failure. It defines what gets restored, in what order, how fast, and by whom. It's specifically about IT systems and data; it doesn't cover people, facilities, or suppliers the way a Business Continuity Plan does.

Key components

• Recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) per critical system — RTO is the maximum acceptable time a system can be down; RPO is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, measured in time since the last good backup. Both are set per system, not as one blanket number for everything.
• A prioritized recovery sequence — the order systems get restored in, reflecting the reality that not everything can be brought back simultaneously and some systems are prerequisites for others.
• Backup strategy and a verified restore procedure — what's backed up, how often, where it's stored, and a documented, tested procedure for actually restoring from it, not just a description of the backup job.
• Clear roles for who executes the plan — named people or teams responsible for each part of the recovery, so execution doesn't start with figuring out who's doing what.
• Dependency mapping — which systems rely on which others, so the recovery sequence can actually reflect those dependencies instead of an arbitrary priority list.

Why RTO and RPO need to be realistic, not aspirational

It's easy to write down an RTO of "under one hour" because that's what sounds acceptable to the business, without ever confirming the backup and restore process can actually hit it. An RTO or RPO that was never tested against the real system, the real backup size, and the real restore speed is just a guess — and a guess that will turn out wrong at exactly the moment it matters most: during a real disaster, under pressure, with no time to discover that the "one hour" restore actually takes six. Setting objectives from measured, tested restore performance (see Disaster Recovery Testing) rather than from what sounds reasonable is what makes them commitments instead of hopes.

Common pitfalls

• A plan that's never actually been tested — a disaster recovery plan whose assumptions haven't been verified through Disaster Recovery Testing is a set of untested guesses about what will work, discovered wrong only during a real event.
• Backups that exist but were never test-restored — a backup job that runs successfully every night says nothing about whether the resulting backup can actually be restored; corruption or incompleteness is often discovered only when a real restore is attempted for the first time, during an actual disaster.
• A recovery sequence that doesn't reflect real dependencies — restoring a system before the other systems it depends on leaves it unable to actually function once it's back, wasting the recovery window on the wrong order.
• RTO and RPO set aspirationally rather than measured — objectives chosen because they sound acceptable, without confirming the backup and restore process can actually deliver them.
• No named roles for execution — a plan that describes what needs to happen but not who does it burns the first, most valuable minutes of a real disaster figuring out ownership.
• Plan not updated as systems change — new systems added or architecture changed since the plan was written leave gaps that surface only when a real recovery is attempted.

Learn more

• Disaster Recovery Testing for verifying that this plan's assumptions, RTOs, and RPOs actually hold up in practice.
• Business Continuity Plan for the broader, org-wide continuity plan this IT-specific plan is one piece of.
• Runbook for the step-by-step technical procedures a recovery sequence typically invokes for each system.
• Configuration Management for keeping a system's configuration recorded and reproducible, which a recovery often depends on.