A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a document that describes how an organization should behave and resume work after an unplanned incident. The recovery plan is one part of crisis management and business continuity.
Why a disaster recovery plan is important
In the case of a serious incident, accident or some large-scale outage, a stressful situation arises, in which workers may choose work procedures that are not optimal in terms of time consumption or quality of solutions. A recovery plan drawn up in advance and at ease clearly defines the procedure for these deficiencies, which helps to remove stressful "shortcuts" and gives all those involved a guide on how to proceed. It thus helps restore the situation to normal, significantly shortens the intervention time, reduces the error rate and the risks of neglecting important contexts.
In which areas is the recovery plan used?
It is most often used in IT in connection with restoring data from a backup, but in practice a recovery plan also exists for infrastructure, for example in the event of a power outage. It can be used in such situations where there is a backup (such as data) or a backup option (such as an electricity generator)
- The organization should have recovery plans in place for the most likely crashes with the greatest impact on the organization's operations
- The recovery plan envisages the use of a backup or a backup variant of operation
- Restoration can also concern the production process, for example in the event of a power supply failure
What does a disaster recovery plan include?
They must give everyone involved a clear plan of what to do and what to use. At a minimum, it should include the following:
- Location and description of backups or backup variants
- Backup contact or access data
- How to activate backup, how to use it
- Order of restoration of individual system components
- How to verify a successful backup restore
- Next procedure after recovery