disaster recovery plans examples

How to Write a Disaster Recovery Plan + Template

Table of Contents

What is a disaster recovery plan?

Disaster recovery plan vs business continuity plan, what are the measures included in a disaster recovery plan, how to write a disaster recovery plan, disaster recovery plan template, disaster recovery plan examples, how secureframe can help your disaster recovery planning efforts.

• July 27, 2023

Anna Fitzgerald

Senior Content Marketing Manager at Secureframe

Cavan Leung

Senior Compliance Manager at Secureframe

A study found that only 54% of organizations have a company-wide disaster recovery plan in place. This percentage is even lower for government IT departments (36%) despite the proliferation of ransomware and other cyber threats. 

Not having a documented disaster recovery plan can seriously hamper an organization’s ability to recover lost data and restore its critical systems. This can result in significantly higher financial losses and reputational damage.

To help ensure your organization can recover from disaster as swiftly and easily as possible, learn what exactly a disaster recovery plan is and how to write one. Plus, find some examples and a template to help get you started.

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a document that outlines the procedures an organization will follow to recover and restore its critical systems, operations, and data after a disaster. Examples of disasters that may disrupt the continuity of product or service delivery are natural disasters, cyber attacks, hardware failures, and human errors. 

In planning for disaster recovery, what is the ultimate goal?

The ultimate goal of disaster recovery planning is to minimize the impact of a disaster, and ensure business continuity.

Having a disaster recovery plan in place that is well-designed and regularly maintained can help organizations:

• minimize downtime
• reduce financial losses
• protect critical data
• resume operations quickly 
• provide peace of mind for employees

A disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan both take a proactive approach to minimize the impact of a disaster before it occurs and may even be combined into a single document as a result. 

However, the key difference is that a disaster recovery plan focuses on limiting abnormal or inefficient system function by restoring it as quickly as possible after a disaster, whereas a business continuity plan focuses on limiting operational downtime by maintaining operations during a disaster. 

In other words, a disaster recovery strategy helps to ensure an organization returns to full functionality after a disaster occurs whereas a business continuity plan helps an organization to keep operating at some capacity during a disaster. That’s why organizations need to have both documents in place, or need to incorporate disaster recovery strategies as part of their overall business continuity plan. 

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Just as no two businesses are the same, no two disaster recovery plans are. However, they do typically include some common measures. These are detailed below.

• Data backup and recovery

A section of a DRP should be dedicated to data backup and recovery. This should list backup methods, frequency of backups, the storage locations, and the procedures for data restoration.

• Redundant systems and infrastructure

Another section may explain how the organization implements redundant systems and infrastructure to ensure high availability and minimize downtime if a disaster occurs. This may involve duplicating critical servers, network equipment, power supplies, and storage devices using clustering, load balancing, failover mechanisms, virtualization technologies, or other measures. 

Alternate worksite

A DRP may identify alternative worksites or recovery locations where the organization can operate if the primary site becomes inaccessible. This section should also define procedures and infrastructure needed to quickly transition operations to the identified alternate sites.

• Communication and notification

Another part of DRP may define communication protocols and notification procedures to ensure communication during and after a disaster. Protocols and procedures typically include:

• notifying employees, customers, vendors, and stakeholders about the disaster
• providing updates on recovery progress
• maintaining contact information for key personnel and emergency services

Recovery objectives

A DRP may set acceptable time frames for recovering systems and data in terms of recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). These objectives should be based on the criticality of systems and shape recovery strategies accordingly. 

• RTO : The maximum amount of downtime allowed
• RPO : The maximum loss of data accepted (measured in time)

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Writing and maintaining a disaster recovery plan requires collaboration and coordination among key stakeholders across an organization and can seem intimidating. Below we’ll outline the process step by step to help you get started. 

1. Define the plan’s objectives and scope

To start, define the objectives and scope of your disaster recovery plan.

Objectives may include:

• safeguarding employees’ lives and company assets
• making a financial and operational assessment
• securing data
• quickly recovering operations

Next, identify what and who the plan applies. Typically, assets utilized by employees and contractors acting on behalf of the company or accessing its applications, infrastructure, systems, or data fall within the scope of the disaster recovery plan. In this case, employees and contractors are required to review and accept the plan. 

2. Perform a risk assessment

Identify potential risks and vulnerabilities that could lead to a disaster, both internal and external to the organization. This should involve evaluating your reliance on external vendors and suppliers for critical services or resources and assessing their own disaster recovery capabilities to ensure they align with your organization's requirements.

3. Perform a business impact analysis

Next, determine the business functions, processes, systems, and data that are essential for your organization's operations. For each critical component, establish recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives. 

4. Define recovery measures and procedures

Define the appropriate measures and step-by-step procedures for disaster recovery based on the risks and business impact you identified. This includes identifying the individuals or teams responsible for recovery tasks, the resources required, and the order of recovery tasks.

As stated above, these recovery tasks may fall into the following categories:

• Alternative worksite

You may also want to outline emergency procedures. These are the actions that should be taken during and immediately after a disaster occurs, and may include evacuation plans and communication protocols and coordination with emergency services.

5. Conduct testing and training regularly

Regularly test the disaster recovery plan to ensure its effectiveness and identify any potential gaps or weaknesses. Conduct training sessions for employees to familiarize them with their roles and responsibilities during a disaster.

6. Review and update the plan regularly

Review and update the disaster recovery plan periodically to incorporate changes in technology, business operations, and potential risks. Ensure that contact information, system configurations, and other relevant details are up to date.

Use this template to kick off your disaster recovery planning and customize it based on your organization's specific risks and objectives.

Below you can find examples of disaster recovery strategies and procedures from disaster recovery plans created and maintained by universities and other organizations. This should help you in brainstorming and documenting your own recovery strategies and plans for different services, environments, and types of disasters. 

1. IT disaster recovery plan

Southern Oregon University has a comprehensive disaster recovery plan specifically for its IT services because they are so heavily relied upon by faculty, staff, and students. There are disaster recovery processes and procedures outlined for various IT services and infrastructure, including its data center, network infrastructure, enterprise systems, desktop hardware, client applications, classrooms, and labs. 

Some of the IT disaster recovery processes and procedures outlined in the plan are:

• Secure facility as necessary to prevent personnel injury and further damage to IT systems.
• Coordinate hardware and software replacement with vendors
• Verify operational ability of all equipment on-site in the affected area (servers, network equipment, ancillary equipment, etc.). If equipment is not operational, initiate actions to repair or replace as needed.
• If the data center is not operational or recoverable, contact personnel responsible for the alternate data center and take necessary steps to ready the facility.
• Retrieve most recent on-site or off-site back-up media for previous three back-ups. Prepare back-up media for transfer to primary or secondary datacenter, as determined during the initial assessment.

2. AWS disaster recovery plan

AWS walks through disaster recovery options in the cloud in this whitepaper . It explains four primary approaches to cloud disaster recovery:

• Backup and restor e: Backup the data, infrastructure, configuration, and application code of your primary Region and redeploy them in the recovery Region. This is the least costly and complex approach. 
• Pilot light : Replicate your data from one Region to another and provision a copy of your core workload infrastructure so that you can quickly provision a full scale production environment by switching on and scaling out your application servers if a disaster occurs. This simplifies recovery at the time of a disaster and also minimizes the ongoing cost of disaster recovery by “switching off” some resources until they’re needed.
• Warm standby : Create and maintain a scaled down, but fully functional, copy of your production environment in another Region. This decreases the time to recovery compared to the pilot light approach, but is more costly because it requires more active resources.  
• Multi-site active/active : Run your workload simultaneously in multiple Regions so users are able to access your workload in any of the Regions in which it is deployed, which reduces your recovery time to near zero for most disasters. This is the most costly and complex approach. 

3. Data center disaster recovery plan

The University of Iowa also has a comprehensive disaster recovery plan , which includes several processes and procedures for recovering from a disaster that affects its data center. Some of these include: 

• Have large tarps or plastic sheeting available in the data center ready to cover sensitive electronic equipment in case the building is damaged due to natural disasters like tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes.
• If replacement equipment is required, make every attempt to replicate the current system configuration.
• If data is lost, then request that the IT department recover it from an off-site backup or cloud deep archive storage.

Secureframe’s automation compliance platform and in-house compliance expertise can help ensure your organization has the policies, controls, and expertise in place to protect systems proactively from business disaster and to recover if they do occur. Request a demo to learn how.

What are the 5 steps of disaster recovery planning?

The five steps of disaster recovery planning are prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. That means when planning, you should identify measures and actions to:

• avoid or prevent a disaster from occurring
• reduce the chances of a disaster occurring or the impact of it
• enhance your ability to respond when a disaster occurs
• be carried out immediately before, during, and after a disaster
• restore your business operations as quickly as possible

What are the 4 C's of disaster recovery?

The 4 C's of disaster recovery are communication, coordination, collaboration, and cooperation. Below are brief definitions of each:

• Communication  - developing and maintaining effective channels for sharing information before, during, and after disasters
• Coordination  - aligning actions to other parts of an organization or other organization to prepare for and respond to disasters
• Cooperation  - working with internal or external parties that share the same goal (ie. responding to and recovering from disasters) and strategies for achieving it
• Collaboration - partnering with internal or external parties to identify challenges and responsibilities to recover from a disaster as quickly as possible

What are the three types of disaster recovery plans?

Disaster recover plans can be tailored to different services, environments, and types of disasters. So types of disaster recovery plans include ones for IT services, data centers, and cloud environments.

How do you create a good disaster recovery plan?

Creating a good disaster recovery plan requires a few key steps such as:

• Performing a risk assessment and business impact analysis
• Setting objectives, including recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO)
• Creating an inventory of critical assets
• Defining data backup requirements and recovery strategies
• Establishing alternate communication methods
• Assigning specific roles and responsibilities

What are the key elements of a disaster recovery plan?

Key elements of a disaster recovery plan are:

• Objectives and goals
• Recovery measures and procedures
• Testing processes
• A communication plan
• Defined disaster recovery stages

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What is a disaster recovery plan + complete checklist.

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a set of detailed, documented guidelines that outline a business’ critical assets and explain how the organization will respond to unplanned incidents. Unplanned incidents or disasters typically include cyber attacks , system failures, power outages, natural disasters, equipment failures, or infrastructure disasters.

More specifically, a disaster recovery plan measures how capable an organization’s ability to restore IT infrastructure functionality and access to critical data, regardless of the disaster event.

A DRP should identify the responsibilities of staff within the organization, outline the step-by-step instructions for the disaster recovery process, and create plans to mitigate and reduce the impact of the incident so that the company can resume basic operations.

Why Is Having a Disaster Recovery Plan Important?

Disaster recovery plans are just one part of an overall security plan and should be established and implemented along with business continuity plans and incident response plans . Without these plans in place, companies can suffer catastrophic damage in form of data loss, data exposure, significantly reduced productivity, penalties and fines, reputational damage, lost revenue, and unplanned recovery expenses.

Creating disaster recovery plans, along with business continuity and incident response plans, can help build confidence with stakeholders, investors, clients, and business partners that demonstrate the capability and preparation to deal with any incident.

What is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) is similar to a disaster recovery plan, but a continuity plan is an overarching plan that outlines the steps needed for a business to continue operating in the event of an incident or disaster. A disaster recovery plan considers a more structured approach to the recovery process rather than the continuity process.

Learn more about business continuity plans >

What is an Incident Response Plan?

Incident response plans are critical to any security program because they provide detailed actions for responding and reacting to specific incidents. An incident response plan is focused on handling a cybersecurity incident and its fallout from start to finish, whereas a DR plan is a more robust plan that considers the potential of serious damage to the whole enterprise and how to restore technology.

Learn more about incident response plans >

Disaster Recovery Plan Checklist

Clear disaster response procedures are critical. Implementing disaster recovery quickly minimizes damage and speeds up recovery. The first few hours, in particular, can be critical. The disaster recovery plan’s emergency response procedures section should comprise clear, practical steps in language sufficient for widespread understanding.

A disaster recovery plan should be organized by location and type of disaster. No single disaster recovery plan template exists because every business is different, but a comprehensive disaster recovery plan should cover the following factors:

1. Perform a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

A business impact analysis should be performed before creating a disaster recovery or business continuity plan . The analysis should determine the entire scope of potential aftereffects and impacts in case of a disruption to critical business operations.

Each potential disaster scenario must be planned for, and the systems and subsequent parties that will be affected must also be identified to determine which business components must be protected first to continue operating. The main difference between a BIA and BCP is that a BIA assesses the potential impact while a BCP outlines a plan based on the BIA to ensure operations are minimally affected.

Impacts that should be considered include:

• Loss of sales or income
• Cost of recovery (time, labor, equipment, staffing, public relations)
• Total business downtime
• Regulatory fines for failed compliance
• Damage to reputation or customer trust

Ultimately, a BIA provides the necessary context and data for businesses to progress in their risk management and disaster recovery processes.

2. Perform Risk Analysis and Vulnerability Assessments

Risk analysis and vulnerability assessments identify the biggest threats and vulnerabilities that could potentially affect the business. The risk and vulnerability assessment process is designed to help businesses prioritize risk and vulnerability mitigation processes.

Different threats and vulnerabilities can affect different industries, so it’s important to identify which ones pose the biggest risk to your organization. Risks should be classified by the likelihood of occurrence and impact on assets, so the company can begin to plan business recovery processes surrounding those threats.

Risk analyses are important to anticipate and plan for the worst-case scenario and have plans in place to minimize the impact of a critical disaster. Once the risks and vulnerabilities have been identified, businesses can begin to build a risk management plan.

Risk analysis can be accomplished in two ways: qualitative and quantitative risk analysis methods . Qualitative risk analysis assesses risk using subjective data (such as perceived reputational impact) and hypothetical scenarios to determine disaster impact. Quantitative risk analysis measures risk through statistical probabilities and estimated quantifiable impact to determine risk tolerance and risk management cost investments.

Both processes should be conducted together to have a complete overview of the organization’s risk acceptance and resilience, which can then be used to make more informed business decisions.

Learn more about how to perform a cyber risk analysis >

2. Identify Roles and Responsibilities

A disaster recovery plan needs to define the roles and responsibilities of the disaster recovery team or those within the organization responsible for the following processes:

• Maintaining business continuity systems
• Incident reporting to executive management, stakeholders, and related authorities
• Who is in charge of overseeing the crisis and ensuring recovery
• Team members’ roles in securing and protecting critical business components
• Contacting third-party vendors or affected parties
• Liaising with people external to the organization, such as customers, clients, and the press

3. Take Inventory of Assets

To properly manage a cyber incident or cyber threat , it’s important to understand the complete overview of the assets an organization handles. Taking inventory of the organization’s IT infrastructure, including hardware, software, applications, and critical data allows the organization to prioritize the most valuable systems and assets to protect.

Asset inventory should be updated regularly in the disaster recovery plan, especially if there are large changes to the asset management strategy. To facilitate prioritization, the inventory should categorize inventory as follows:

• Critical assets essential to business operations
• Important assets, such as applications used once or more per day and whose absence would disrupt typical operations
• Unimportant assets, which are accessed or used less than once per day

Sensitive data , such as payment details, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information (PII) , can also be subject to compliance requirements . A disaster recovery plan needs to address how critical data is handled during a crisis or disaster in relation to compliance standards.

In addition, it’s important to note that the people with the authority to access sensitive data during normal business operations may differ from those who can access sensitive data during a disaster to ensure its safety.

4. Disaster Recovery Sites

Disaster recovery sites refer to where the company’s assets are located and where they will be moved if disaster strikes. Businesses need to have the sites defined ahead of time should an incident occur, whether the assets are physical or digital.

The three types of recovery sites are as follows:

• Cold sites — Used to store data backups but cannot immediately run systems.
• Warm sites — Functional data centers that allow access to critical systems. However, up-to-date customer data may be unavailable.
• Hot sites — Functioning data centers that contain IT equipment and personnel to use it, as well as up-to-date customer data.

In the event that businesses are still using physical documents and storage media that are still important to business operations, the disaster recovery plan also needs to include where these physical copies will be stored offsite in case of disaster.

As good practice, recovery sites and data backups should be updated regularly. Organizations should implement backup procedures at least a few times per week to ensure business continuity.

5. Disaster Recovery Testing

Much a fire or earthquake drill, it’s necessary to test the disaster recovery procedure and its procedures at least once a year. The plan should be tested in a simulated situation that varies in complexity to ensure protection against all threats.

Testing phases should accomplish the following steps:

• Identify faults and inconsistencies within the plan that can lead to potential miscommunication or improper incident management
• Ensure all relevant team members know their specific roles, duties, and workloads
• Simulate a live cyber attack or other disasters
• Test success of recovery site upload and backup processes

Regular testing should include updates to the plan and any new threats or vulnerabilities that pose a risk to critical assets.

6. Communication or Reporting Plan

Communicating information about the nature, impact, and cause of a disaster can be critical to the company’s reputation. Timely communication and incident reporting may also be required to comply with cybersecurity regulations . Therefore, the disaster recovery plan needs to define who will deliver what information to whom in the event of a disaster.

Parties that need to be kept up to date will include any or all of the following:

• Stakeholders or investors
• Executive management
• Staff and employees
• Relevant third-party vendors
• Governing authorities
• Customers and clients
• Media outlets and press
• Legal counsel

To ensure that communication is clear and prompt, the plan should outline who has primary communication responsibilities and which communication channels they should use.

7. Minimum Physical Facility Requirements

A part of the disaster recovery plan should include the minimum physical facilities a business needs to operate if its usual facility is rendered unusable by a disaster, such as an earthquake. Minimum physical facility requirements should include how much space is required, where it needs to be located, and what equipment is required.

8. RTO and RPO

As part of the disaster recovery planning process, businesses also need to define its RTO and RPO as part of its recovery strategy:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - A business’s RTO is how long it can tolerate an interruption to normal operations. This can be anything from a few minutes to many hours, depending on the nature of the business.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - The RPO refers to how much data the organization can stand to lose and is normally measured in time, such as an hour of data or 24 hours of data. A business that backs up once daily considers its RPO 24 hours.

Benefits of a Disaster Recovery Plan

Ultimately, the aim of a thorough disaster recovery plan is to facilitate faster response and smoother restoration if disaster strikes, such as a data breach or cyber attack that results in data loss or downtime .

With the increasing prevalence of cyber attacks and human error in the information technology (IT) sphere involving malware like ransomware , affected businesses are seeing rising costs and damages due to poor recovery execution and extended downtimes. It’s imperative to have strong disaster recovery processes as part of the entire business strategy

• Lower Cyber Insurance Premiums - The modern threat landscape is such that more businesses require cyber insurance to protect themselves in case of a severe cyber attack. The cyber liability insurance industry has reached a point where it can no longer insure all businesses unless they have clearly defined security programs that minimize its overall risk. Having a disaster recovery plan can significantly lower the overall risk profile of a business and thus lower the associated cyber liability insurance premiums .
• Fewer Recovery Costs - Formal policies and procedures demonstrating a firm’s preparedness for unplanned events can also lower costs during a data breach by helping team members respond to the issues, shortening the data breach lifecycle. The more time that is spent responding to the disaster can lead to increased damages and loss of business.
• Minimal Penalties - In heavily-regulated sectors like healthcare or public entities, penalties for a data breach and non-compliance with cybersecurity regulations can be costly. The longer a data breach lasts, the more significant the potential penalties can be for non-compliance. A business with a disaster recovery plan will likely recover far more quickly than a company without one.
• Minimal Business Interruption - Anything facilitating restoring technology will reduce costs for the organization if an unplanned incident interrupts operations. An excellent IT disaster recovery plan can differentiate between minimal impact and complete operational shutdown. When a cyber attack or another incident interrupts critical services, organizations must do all they can to restore technology and normal business processes as quickly as possible.

What Is a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

A DRaaS provider is a third-party provider that uses cloud technology to facilitate rapid restoration of data servers and applications in case of an emergency or disaster.

A third-party solution provider’s security policies and procedures will impact data and database recovery, so it’s highly recommended to work with a trusted vendor that includes data protection as a core part of their offering. Subscribers should also consider the capacity of the provider to ensure it can handle the data transfer required for backing up and restoring the business’s information systems effectively.

Cloud disaster recovery solutions can have the following benefits for modern businesses.

• Connectivity - One of the benefits of DRaaS is that restorations can be initiated from any location using various kinds of computers, which is ideal in a disaster scenario that may affect physical locations and data. It makes sense to use a provider in another region to avoid the likelihood of the DRaaS provider being affected by the same physical disaster as the subscriber. This way, a business affected by a geographically-specific disaster can use cloud services to create a functional data center in a new location to restore its applications and customer data.
• Instant Mirroring - Another benefit of DRaaS is that they mirror data changes instantly. This cloud service creates a backup database server that copies the master database server created on the fly. With such a system, restoration can be performed from a point seconds before an outage.
• Cost-Effective - For many organizations, migrating to cloud services for data management and disaster recovery processes is a cost-effective contingency plan for disruptive events. Excellent cloud service DR providers provide around-the-clock data protection and data management , keeping software up-to-date and monitoring the network to prevent data breaches in the first place. They can also respond quickly and automatically in the event of a disaster.

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What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Disaster recovery (DR) is an organization’s ability to restore access and functionality to IT infrastructure after a disaster event, whether natural or caused by human action (or error). DR is considered a subset of business continuity, explicitly focusing on ensuring that the IT systems that support critical business functions are operational as soon as possible after a disruptive event occurs.

Today, disaster recovery planning is crucial for any business, especially those operating either partially or entirely in the cloud. Disasters that interrupt service and cause data loss can happen anytime without warning—your network could have an outage, a critical bug could get released, or your business might have to weather a natural disaster. Organizations with robust and well-tested disaster recovery strategies can minimize the impact of disruptions, achieve faster recovery times, and resume core operations rapidly when things go awry.   

Learn more about Google Cloud backup and disaster recovery features and products and how they can be used to build the right DR solution for your business.

IT disaster recovery defined

IT disaster recovery is a portfolio of policies, tools, and processes used to recover or continue operations of critical IT infrastructure, software, and systems after a natural or human-made disaster.

The first and foremost aspect of a disaster recovery plan is cloud. The cloud is considered the best solution for both business continuity and disaster recovery. The cloud eliminates the need to run a separate disaster recovery data center (or recovery site). 

What is a disaster recovery site? 

It’s a second, physical data center that’s costly to build and maintain—and with the cloud, made unnecessary.

What is considered a disaster?

Dr planning and strategies focus on responding to and recovering from disasters—events that disrupt or completely stop a business from operating..

While these events can be natural disasters like a hurricane, they can also be caused by a severe system failure, an intentional attack, or even human error. 

Types of disasters can include: 

• Natural disasters (for example, earthquakes, floods, tornados, hurricanes, or wildfires)
• Pandemics and epidemics
• Cyber attacks (for example, malware, DDoS, and ransomware attacks)
• Other intentional, human-caused threats such as terrorist or biochemical attacks
• Technological hazards (for example, power outages, pipeline explosions, and transportation accidents)
• Machine and hardware failure 

Importance of disaster recovery

Technology plays an increasingly important role in every aspect of business, with applications and services enabling companies to be more agile, available, and connected. This trend has contributed to the widespread adoption of cloud computing by organizations to drive growth, innovation, and exceptional customer experience. 

However, the migration to cloud environments—public, private, hybrid, or multicloud—and the rise of remote workforces are introducing more infrastructure complexity and potential risks. Disaster recovery for cloud-based systems is critical to an overall business continuity strategy. A system breakdown or unplanned downtime can have serious consequences for enterprises that rely heavily on cloud-based resources, applications, documents, and data storage to keep things running smoothly. 

In addition, data privacy laws and standards stipulate that most organizations are now required to have a disaster recovery strategy. Failure to follow DR plans can result in compliance violations and steep regulatory fines. 

Every business needs to be able to recover quickly from any event that stops day-to-day operations, no matter what industry or size. Without a disaster recovery plan, a company can suffer data loss, reduced productivity, out-of-budget expenses, and reputational damage that can lead to lost customers and revenue. 

How disaster recovery works

Disaster recovery relies on having a solid plan to get critical applications and infrastructure up and running after an outage—ideally within minutes..

An effective DR plan addresses three different elements for recovery: 

• Preventive: Ensuring your systems are as secure and reliable as possible, using tools and techniques to prevent a disaster from occurring in the first place. This may include backing up critical data or continuously monitoring environments for configuration errors and compliance violations. 
• Detective: For rapid recovery, you’ll need to know when a response is necessary. These measures focus on detecting or discovering unwanted events as they happen in real time. 
• Corrective: These measures are aimed at planning for potential DR scenarios, ensuring backup operations to reduce impact, and putting recovery procedures into action to restore data and systems quickly when the time comes. 

Typically, disaster recovery involves securely replicating and backing up critical data and workloads to a secondary location or multiple locations—disaster recovery sites. A disaster recovery site can be used to recover data from the most recent backup or a previous point in time. Organizations can also switch to using a DR site if the primary location and its systems fail due to an unforeseen event until the primary one is restored.

Types of disaster recovery

The types of disaster recovery you’ll need will depend on your it infrastructure, the type of backup and recovery you use, and the assets you need to protect..

Here are some of the most common technologies and techniques used in disaster recovery: 

• Backups: With backups, you back up data to an offsite system or ship an external drive to an offsite location. However, backups do not include any IT infrastructure, so they are not considered a full disaster recovery solution. 
• Backup as a service (BaaS): Similar to remote data backups, BaaS solutions provide regular data backups offered by a third-party provider. 
• Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS): Many cloud providers offer DRaaS, along with cloud service models like IaaS and PaaS . A DRaaS service model allows you to back up your data and IT infrastructure and host them on a third-party provider’s cloud infrastructure. During a crisis, the provider will implement and orchestrate your DR plan to help recover access and functionality with minimal interruption to operations.  
• Point-in-time snapshots: Also known as point-in-time copies, snapshots replicate data, files, or even an entire database at a specific point in time. Snapshots can be used to restore data as long as the copy is stored in a location unaffected by the event. However, some data loss can occur depending on when the snapshot was made. 
• Virtual DR: Virtual DR solutions allow you to back up operations and data or even create a complete replica of your IT infrastructure and run it on offsite virtual machines (VMs). In the event of a disaster, you can reload your backup and resume operation quickly. This solution requires frequent data and workload transfers to be effective. 
• Disaster recovery sites: These are locations that organizations can temporarily use after a disaster event, which contain backups of data, systems, and other technology infrastructure.

Benefits of disaster recovery

Stronger business continuity.

Every second counts when your business goes offline, impacting productivity, customer experience, and your company’s reputation. Disaster recovery helps safeguard critical business operations by ensuring they can recover with minimal or no interruption. 

Enhanced security

DR plans use data backup and other procedures that strengthen your security posture and limit the impact of attacks and other security risks. For example, cloud-based disaster recovery solutions offer built-in security capabilities, such as advanced encryption, identity and access management, and organizational policy. 

Faster recovery

Disaster recovery solutions make restoring your data and workloads easier so you can get business operations back online quickly after a catastrophic event. DR plans leverage data replication and often rely on automated recovery to minimize downtime and data loss.

Reduced recovery costs

The monetary impacts of a disaster event can be significant, ranging from loss of business and productivity to data privacy penalties to ransoms. With disaster recovery, you can avoid, or at least minimize, some of these costs. Cloud DR processes can also reduce the operating costs of running and maintaining a secondary location.

High availability

Many cloud-based services come with high availability (HA) features that can support your DR strategy. HA capabilities help ensure an agreed level of performance and offer built-in redundancy and automatic failover, protecting data against equipment failure and other smaller-scale events that may impact data availability. 

Better compliance

DR planning supports compliance requirements by considering potential risks and defining a set of specific procedures and protections for your data and workloads in the event of a disaster. This usually includes strong data backup practices, DR sites, and regularly testing your DR plan to ensure that your organization is prepared. 

Planning a disaster recovery strategy

A comprehensive disaster recovery strategy should include detailed emergency response requirements, backup operations, and recovery procedures. DR strategies and plans often help form a broader business continuity strategy, which includes contingency plans to mitigate impact beyond IT infrastructure and systems, allowing all business areas to resume normal operations as soon as possible. 

When it comes to creating disaster recovery strategies, you should carefully consider the following key metrics: 

• Recovery time objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable length of time that systems and applications can be down without causing significant damage to the business. For example, some applications can be offline for an hour, while others might need to recover in minutes.
• Recovery point objective (RPO) : The maximum age of data you need to recover to resume operations after a major event. RPO helps to define the frequency of backups. 

These metrics are particularly useful when conducting risk assessments and business impact analysis (BIA) for potential disasters, from moderate to worst-case scenarios. Risk assessments and BIAs evaluate all functional areas of a business and the consequences of any risks, which can help define DR goals and the actions needed to achieve them before or after an event occurs. 

When creating your recovery strategy, it’s useful to consider your RTO and RPO values and pick a DR pattern that will enable you to meet those values and your overall goals. Typically, the smaller your values (or the faster your applications need to recover after an interruption), the higher the cost to run your application. 

Cloud disaster recovery can greatly reduce the costs of RTO and RPO when it comes to fulfilling on-premises requirements for capacity, security, network infrastructure, bandwidth, support, and facilities. A highly managed service on Google Cloud can help you avoid most, if not all, complicating factors and allow you to reduce many business costs significantly. 

For more guidance on using Google Cloud to address disaster recovery, you can read our Disaster recovery planning guide or contact your account manager for help with creating a DR plan.

Solve your business challenges with Google Cloud

What is disaster recovery used for, ensure business resilience.

No matter what happens, a good DR plan can ensure that the business can return to full operations rapidly, without losing data or transactions.

Maintain competitiveness

When a business goes offline, customers are rarely loyal. They turn to competitors to get the goods or services they require. A DR plan prevents this.

Avoid regulatory risks

Many industries have regulations dictating where data can be stored and how it must be protected. Heavy fines result if these mandates are not met.

Avoid data loss

The longer a business’s systems are down, the greater the risk that data will be lost. A robust DR plan minimizes this risk.

Keep customers happy

Meeting customer service level agreements (SLAs) is always a priority. A well-executed DR plan can help businesses achieve SLAs despite challenges.

Maintain reputation

A business that has trouble resuming operations after an outage can suffer brand damage. For that reason, a solid DR plan is critical.

Related products and services

Google offers many products that can be used as building blocks when creating a secure and reliable DR plan, including Cloud Storage .

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Blog > Data Availability > 3 Real-world Disaster Recovery Scenarios

3 Real-world Disaster Recovery Scenarios

When a midsize manufacturing company got hit with a ransomware attack, the IT Director had the unenviable task of breaking the news to the CEO.  The firm’s ERP database had been compromised, and a well-organized group of hackers was demanding tens of thousands of dollars to release the data.

Manufacturing operations were heavily reliant on the company’s IT systems. Inventory, production processes, customer orders, and shipments were all managed within a single, highly integrated system. Without its ERP system, the company was brought to a near standstill.

Even if the company paid the ransom, top executives weren’t sure that would mean an end to their problems. Recent backups were also compromised, so the only options were to pay up or try to rebuild from an older copy of the company’s database.  It took two months to recover from the damage.

Why You Need Robust Disaster Recovery

We have all heard about the crippling ransomware attacks on  Colonial Pipeline  and other large companies.  Yet most ransomware attacks never show up in the headlines. Many are aimed at small and midsize organizations, and they’re increasing in frequency.

Ransomware isn’t the only reason you need a robust disaster recovery (DR) strategy, of course. Natural disasters, localized hazards, and acts of sabotage can also be devastating.

Experts estimate the average cost of downtime at  around $9,000 per minute . According to cybersecurity company Malwarebytes,  1 in 5 businesses  that experience cyber-attacks are compelled to completely cease operations until they can resolve the crisis. And those costs don’t include the cost of recovering data that has been compromised or destroyed.  Insurance carrier Hiscox estimates that the average cost of recovery is  $200,000 .

This article shares  disaster recovery plan  examples in reaction to three real-world scenarios. We’ll also explain what a successful recovery process looks like.

Disaster Recovery Plan Examples:

Let’s look at a few situations involving the restoration of data availability. The lessons below apply generally to any type of disaster recovery scenario.

Example 1: A DDoS Attack

Imagine that a group of malicious  hackers  executes a Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack against your company. The DDoS attack focuses on overwhelming your network with illegitimate requests so that legitimate data cannot get through.

As a result, your business can no longer connect to databases that it accesses via the network. In today’s age of cloud-native everything, that probably includes some of your company’s most important databases.

In this scenario, disaster recovery means being able to restore  data availability  even as the DDoS attack is underway. (Ending the DDoS attack would be helpful, too, but anti-DDoS strategies are beyond the scope of this article. Moreover, the reality is that your ability to stop DDoS attacks once they are in progress is  often limited .) Having backup copies of your data is critical in this situation.

What may be less obvious, however, is the importance of having a plan in place for making the backup data available by bringing new servers online to host it. You could do this by simply keeping backup data servers running all the time, ready to switch into production mode at a moment’s notice. That can be costly, however, because it means keeping backup servers running at full capacity all the time.

A more efficient approach is to keep backup data server images on hand, spinning up new virtual servers in the cloud when you need them. Although not instantaneous, this process can take just a few minutes, provided that you have the images and data in place and ready to go.

An air-gapped backup copy of data is a physical copy of data that is stored offline and disconnected from any network or internet connection. This physical copy of the data is typically stored in a secure location, such as a vault or a fireproof safe. Air-gapped backups are considered to be the most secure type of backup because they are not vulnerable to cyberattacks. Air-gapped backups are physically isolated from the internet and other networks, making them immune to cyberattacks such as ransomware and malware. This is because cyberattacks typically rely on network connectivity to spread and infect systems. By keeping backups offline, you ensure that they cannot be compromised by these threats

Read the White Paper

The One Essential Guide to Disaster Recovery: How to Ensure IT and Business Continuity

This white paper provides a basic understanding of the building blocks of IT and business continuity – from understanding the concepts of disaster recovery and information availability to calculating the business impact of downtime and selecting the right software solution.

Example 2: Data Center Destruction

One of the worst-case scenarios that a modern business can face is a disaster that destroys part or all of its data center – including the servers and disks inside it.

While such a situation is rare, it can happen.  It’s not limited to large-scale disasters, either, such as an earthquake or hurricane. Localized events like  electrical surges, burst pipes, or even rodent infestations  can cause permanent data center damage.

The best way to prepare your business for recovery from this type of disaster is to ensure that you have offsite copies of your data. If your production data lives on-premise in one of your data centers, this would mean keeping backups of the data at another data center site or in the cloud. If your data is hosted in the cloud, you could back it up to local storage, another cloud, or a different region of the same cloud.

You should also make sure you have a way of restoring the backup data to the new infrastructure quickly. Moving large amounts of data from one site to another over the Internet can take a long time, so it’s not always a wise strategy to rely on this approach. In some cases, it might be faster to move physical copies of disks from one site to another. Alternatively, it might prove quicker and easier to set up new servers in the data center where your backup data lives, then connect them to the backup data and turn them into your production servers.

The bottom line:  Restoring data after data center destruction requires having offsite copies of the data available, as well as a plan for moving that data quickly to wherever it needs to go following the disaster to keep your business running.

Example 3: Data Sabotage

A third type of data disaster that might befall your business is one in which someone – such as a  disgruntled employee  – deliberately sabotages data. The employee might insert inaccurate or bogus data into your databases, for example, to lower data quality and make the data unusable for your business. He or she might even insert malicious code into your data to spread malware to your systems.

The critical step in preparing for this type of disaster is to ensure that you have backup copies of your data that go back far enough in time to allow you to recover using a version of the data that you know to be safe. If the only copy of your data that you have available was taken a day ago, but the damage occurred three days ago, the backup won’t necessarily help.

This is why it’s a good idea, when possible, to have multiple backups of your data on hand, each taken at a different time increment. Instead of deleting the last data backup when you make a new one, keep older backups on hand so that you can use them for disaster recovery if necessary. If you make a backup daily, and keep seven backups on hand, then you know that you can restore data from as long as a week ago if newer backups contain damaged information.

There is a trade-off when using an older backup for disaster recovery, of course. Any data that was added or modified since the last good backup will be lost. In certain disaster recovery situations, however, this is a relatively small price to pay.

Keep in mind, too, that if you can identify which parts of your data were sabotaged, you can leave that data intact, and recover only the damaged data to minimize data loss.

The time to plan your disaster recovery strategy is now, before you encounter a problem. Get started by reading our free white paper The One Essential Guide to Disaster Recovery . This paper provides a basic understanding of the building blocks of IT and business continuity – from understanding the concepts of disaster recovery and information availability to calculating the business impact of downtime and selecting the right software solution.

This paper provides a basic understanding of the building blocks of IT and business continuity and best practices for disaster recovery.

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The complete guide to disaster recovery planning (DRP)

A disaster recovery plan, or DRP, is a documented process that lays out specific procedures to follow when an organization experiences a disaster (often involving data-loss). It’s designed to minimize data loss and business disruption and, most importantly, to get an organization back on itsfeet as quickly as possible.

An IT disaster recovery plan is an important component of a larger business continuity plan (BCP). In this article, we’ll define what a disaster recovery plan is, why it’s important, and what elements it should encompass. Even if you already have some policies and procedures in place, it’s essential to regularly revisit your risk analysis, make sure you have a trained disaster recovery team in place, test run scenarios, and ensure your plan covers all your bases. With ever-changing technology, evolving cyber risks, and employee turnover, developing and maintaining a DRP must never be a “set it and forget it” exercise.

Importance of a Disaster Recovery Plan

Imagine yourself in these scenarios:

• You’re ankle-deep in water with a hurricane bearing down on you, jeopardizing your own safety while you wonder if you’ll need to try to haul computers out to your car before evacuating; loss of the critical data on those machines could spell the end of your small business.
• You’re responsible for a database of personal identification data, including biometric data and bank account numbers. A hacker slips in through a vulnerability in the API; they sell access to your customers’ data on WhatsApp.
• An unscrupulous employee copies and encrypts the guest reservation database of your multinational hotel chain; you’re fined £18.4 million by the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK.

All of these examples are true stories of data disaster, and all could have been mitigated by a thorough disaster recovery plan.

7 key objectives for a disaster recovery plan

A successful disaster recovery plan will help you:

• Keep employees, facilities, and equipment safe
• Minimize disruptions to business operations
• Limit data loss and exposure of private information
• Cap liability
• Preserve your organization’s reputation
• Reduce financial losses
• Recover lost data

Types of IT Disaster Events

Let’s review some of the most common types of disasters you’ll want to cover in your disaster recovery plan.

Natural disasters

Natural disasters can include highly localized events like a lightning strike causing a fire in your data center, larger disasters like city-wide blackouts caused by storms, or widespread catastrophes like hurricanes or wildfires.

Make sure when you develop your DRP, you’re thinking about the full range of natural disasters from the smallest to the largest, what systems they could affect, and what resources may or may not be available to you during a time of crisis.

Also keep in mind that when we think of the word “disaster”, what often comes to mind is a natural disaster. While you should diligently prepare for natural disasters, your disaster recovery plan should also encompass man-made disasters.

Hackers and cyber attacks

Cybercrime is on the rise. Until 2022, human error was the largest cause of data loss but now for the first time, cyberattacks have become the greatest source of data loss ( source ). Here are some common attack vectors that can give access to hackers and lead to data loss:

• Misconfigurations in applications or servers
• Software vulnerabilities
• SQL injection attacks
• Insider threats
• DNS tunneling
• Zero-day exploits
• Credential theft

When malicious parties gain access to your data using these and other tactics, they can do any combination of the following:

• Install malware on your system
• Steal your data
• Release your data to the public
• Sell your data to the highest bidder
• Demand a ransom for return of your data

Hardware failure

Hardware failure is one of the top causes of data loss and it can create a huge disruption when you least expect it. Endpoints, on-site servers, and external drives are all potential points of hardware failure. Hard drives are among the most fragile parts of computers and there are numerous ways they can be damaged or simply fail. And even cloud storage solutions with multiple layers of protection aren’t completely immune from hardware failure.

Any organization is vulnerable to data loss due to hardware failure, but small businesses are especially likely to suffer from this as they typically house servers on-premises rather than in a managed data center, and they’re less likely to back up their files regularly (and test those backups).

Human error

Let’s face it, nobody’s perfect and anyone who’s ever forgotten to click the save icon on a regular basis knows that unique feeling of terror right after your application crashes. As frustrating as it is to lose an afternoon’s worth of work on a big presentation, the consequences of human error are not limited to data on a single device. According to a study by Stanford University, around 88% of all data breaches are caused by employee error.

Having clear policies, keeping current on employee training, and automating as many processes as possible are all ways to help cut down on the probability of human error.

Some examples of human error include:

• Misconfiguring cloud services
• Falling for phishing scams
• Lost or stolen, or damaged devices
• Accidental deletions or overwrites
• Password mishandling

Stages of a Disaster Recovery Plan

There are many different ways to slice and dice the stages of a disaster recovery plan. Here, we’ll break it down into five stages: Preparation, Assessment, Restoration, Recovery, and Lessons Learned.

1. Preparation

Conduct a risk analysis. Preparing for a natural disaster will look different based on your geographical location. Maybe you’re located somewhere that tends to get hit with rolling blackouts, like California during fire season. Or you could have facilities in the path of hurricanes on the Atlantic coast, or along a fault line. When it comes to human-caused disasters, the likelihood of various incidents are potentially dependent on your industry and your user profile. For example, if you work in the manufacturing or healthcare industries, you should be aware that they’re the top two industries to be targeted by ransomware . And if your users are less tech-savvy, they’re more prone to become a victim of a phishing attack .

Determine potential points of failure. Assess your current state. Are your authentication protocols up to date? Are your physical failovers – like backup power generators or alternate networking equipment – in good working order? Are your files actively being backed up and have you recently tested restoring them? Are your partners staying up to date on their security certifications?

Identify a response team. Different types of disasters will require different disaster response team members. Make sure each person you’ve identified knows their role and be sure to designate a backup in case there’s employee turnover or someone’s on vacation when disaster strikes.

Document everything. And be sure everyone on the team knows where to find the documentation. In addition to documenting your disaster recovery processes themselves, also document things like technical specs, insurance policies, emergency contact information, and relevant government or community resources.

Practice, practice, practice. Disasters are a matter of when, not if. Think how horrified you’d be if a whitewater rafting guide brought you down a new river without doing a test run. It’s the same with disaster planning. With practice, you’ll find hidden obstacles ahead of time, and be able to respond quickly and competently when the time comes.

2. Assessment

Declare the event. The first step in assessing a disaster is to declare the event and notify leadership and your response team. Determine your chain of command based on the type of incident and the team you’ve previously identified. Share necessary information with employees, customers, and any relevant authorities. Keep in mind that how you communicate is just as important as what you communicate. As a team, decide upon necessary audiences (customers, prospects, employees, authorities) and draft communications to be sent as rapidly as possible. Calm, clear, correct communication can be the difference between successful containment and a PR calamity.

Assess current state. Is the disaster ongoing? What can be done now to mitigate further loss, and what is currently out of your control? When dealing with a natural disaster, physical safety should be your true North.

Take inventory . What’s good, what’s lost, what’s potentially recoverable, and what’s destroyed? Take stock of your physical assets like facilities, servers, and products, as well as your digital ones like customer-facing websites, financial databases, and files on users’ computers.

3. Restoration

Get back up and running. Here’s where all your preparation pays off. At this point, you know what you need to do and can immediately begin executing your plan. At this stage of your plan,time is of the essence. ITIC’s Global Server Hardware Security Survey in 2022 found that the average hourly cost of downtime is more than $300,000 – and 44% of medium and large businesses report that an hour of downtime could cost their businesses over $1 million.

Activate your failovers. Depending on your needs and your restore point objectives and restore time objectives (more on RPO and RTO below), you may have full redundancy in some of your systems, or you may have to spin up alternate hardware or set up alternate physical sites.

Keep lines of communication open. Make sure to keep updating your customers, clients, employees, and/or authorities as you work to restore services. In your initial communication with stakeholders, define an update frequency and stick to that cadence even if just to say “we’re still working on it.”

4. Recovery

Confirm everything is working. Now that the crisis has passed, you’ll want to methodically check all your systems to make sure everything is working properly. This is where you can rely on the documentation you had at the outset.

Recover lost data, if possible. Once your operations are restored, attempt to recover any lost data not already addressed. Depending on your data retention policies and RPO decisions you may lose varying amounts of data. If you’ve utilized a 3-2-1 backup strategy you should have at least one other copy of data from which to restore, even if a large-scale disaster (or terrible coincidence) were to take out more than one copy of your important dataat the same time.

5. Lessons Learned

Conduct a debrief. Get together with your disaster recovery team and discuss what went well, what went wrong, and/or what unexpected issues you encountered. Identify gaps in initial preparation AND execution of your plan. It is important at this point to conduct this exercise in the model of a blameless post-mortem. Things broke. Mistakes were made. Assigning blame to team-members is unhelpful to future success.

Integrate learnings into your disaster recovery plan. There will inevitably be something you wished you’d thought of earlier. This is your chance to document everything you’ve learned and update your DRP so you can improve your disaster response next time around.

Benefits of a Disaster Recovery Plan

Like the Scouts’ motto goes: “Be Prepared.” In so many areas of life, preparation is key to both peace of mind and avoiding or minimizing bad outcomes. Disaster preparedness that safeguards your essential business data is no different. We briefly outlined some of the major benefits already, but let’s dive into a few in more depth.

Improved recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO)

As a refresher, recovery time objective (RTO) in the context of data loss refers to how quickly data must be made available after an outage without significantly impacting the organization. A short RTO is essential for operations that are business-critical or timely – like customer-facing websites, or files that were being used by employees at the time of the outage. You can increase your recovery time objective for things that are less critical, which allows you to turn your immediate focus and resources towards the most urgent operations.

Recovery point objective (RPO) , on the other hand, refers to the maximum allowable amount of data that an organization believes it can lose without crippling the business. Defining an RPO necessitates that the organization accept two facts:

• It is not possible to protect all organizational data from disaster For the data that it is unacceptable to lose there is a period of time from the last version which is acceptable
• You need to know how long of a gap in data is acceptable for your organization and what data within your business would be tolerable to theoretically lose completely. This helps you define your RPO which will define the rest of your data integrity and security strategy.

The first step in defining an RPO is to classify your data and understand where it’s stored and whether it’s being backed up. From there, you can negotiate as a business over costs, risks, and impact.

Once we get down to the brass-tacks for example, if you’re running tape backups of an important transactional database once a day, you would lose up to a day’s worth of data when the primary system experiences an outage. Is that acceptable? Is there an opportunity to add additional online redundancy to that system and is it worth the cost (in time, money or both) to mitigate that risk? All of those considerations must be taken into account for business data at every level of your classification schema.

As you construct your plan, you’ll likely need to make tradeoffs on RTO, as you may not have the resources to have layers of redundancy and continuous backups on everything. Therefore, thinking strategically ahead of time will ensure that the business is aware of its exposure in the event of an incident and that makes it much easier to recover in a timely manner.

Having a clear understanding and alignment on your organization’s risk tolerance is a critical foundation to disaster recovery planning. Once you have your RTO and RPOs defined, you’ll use your disaster recovery plan to identify concrete tactics to meet your recovery point and recovery time objectives. A good disaster recovery plan can even uncover ways to exceed those objectives and further minimize risk.

Protecting your organization’s reputation

There are countless examples of customers jumping ship and stock prices plummeting after a data breach. It can take years to repair a brand’s tarnished reputation. According to a 2019 survey by PingIdentity, 81% of people would stop engaging with a brand online following a breach, and only 14% of respondents would readily sign up for and use an application or service following a breach.

The good news is that your disaster recovery plan can mitigate these dismal outcomes. By demonstrating and communicating to your customers and the public that you’re on top of the situation, your organization retains trust with your market. When faced with a data disaster, this can mean the difference between a public relations nightmare and simply a bad day.

During the Preparation stage of your disaster recovery plan, you can define ways to build a foundation of trust with your customers and the public. Some of these may include:

• Identify applicable privacy regulations, like CAN-SPAM laws, CCPA and GDPR regulations and put policies in place to follow them.
• Obtain any security certifications that are applicable to your organization, such as NIST, ISO2700 and SOC2.
• Work with your marketing and web teams to post information about your security protocols on your website. Proactively show that you’re following best practices and that you value keeping your customer’s information safe.
• Educate your customers on how to use your product or service in a way that protects their security and privacy – for example, prompt users to choose secure passwords or set up multi-factor authentication.

You can also include protocols that help to preserve trust during the Restoration stage of your DRP:

• Plan for how you will explain in a timely and transparent way what has happened, who is impacted, and what steps you’re taking to address it.
• Work with your PR and/or social media team to craft a strategy for how to demonstrate calm, transparency and responsiveness through communications channels (press, social, and customer communications) social media during and following a disaster.

Implementing initiatives to gain and keep customers’ trust is an important and sometimes overlooked part of a DRP, and will benefit your organization by helping to preserve your organization’s reputation.This leads to better customer retention and fewer financial losses when there’s a crisis. At this point, in the eyes of external stakeholders, it is often less about whether an organization deals with a data-loss incident and more about how it responds when it does. Having a plan in place beforehand will help ensure your organization rises to the challenge.

Minimizing legal liability

In a well-known case of a mishandled data breach, the CSO of a popular ride sharing app covered up a data breach and instead paid a $100,000 ransom to restore the stolen data. Not only did this executive’s action result in their termination, but they were also later convicted of obstruction of justice for the attempt to cover up the incident. This is not a good outcome for anyone.

Legal liability isn’t just limited to individuals. If a company is found negligent in its handling of customer data, it will find itself vulnerable to lawsuits and/or regulatory penalties. Using a disaster recovery plan, you can do your due diligence and show that when data loss does occur, it’s not due to negligence and there is a plan in place to minimize the impact and address shortcomings. This will save your organization time and headaches..

Because this section talks about legal liability we want to make it clear that none of this amounts to official legal advice. Laws and regulations vary by industry and situation. There are people who have devoted their entire professional careers to this pursuit. Consult with a lawyer if you want more specifics on how to protect yourself and your business from potential liability.

Putting an IT Disaster Recovery Plan Into Place

One last thing we should say about disaster recovery planning: it doesn’t have to be overly complicated to still be worth doing. In fact, if after reading this you feel intimidated, we have unfortunately done you a disservice.

If you do nothing else after reading this article, take some time to review what policies you currently have in place. Do they make sense? Do you know where all your data lives? Is it backed up? Do the relevant stakeholders understand their roles? Shore up what you currently have and then make a plan to expand. If disaster befalls you, you’ll be glad you were better prepared.

Learn more about how CrashPlan is built to protect your data and  help you bounce back from disasters .

9 Point disaster recovery plan checklist

How to create a disaster recovery plan (DRP)

Business continuity vs disaster recovery: The difference explained

Cybersecurity: disaster recovery planning to protect your business from ransomware.

CrashPlan® provides peace of mind through secure, scalable, and straightforward endpoint data backup. We help organizations recover from any worst-case scenario, whether it is a disaster, simple human error, a stolen laptop, ransomware or an as-of-yet undiscovered calamity.

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Disaster recovery (DR) consists of IT technologies and best practices designed to prevent or minimize data loss and business disruption resulting from catastrophic events—everything from equipment failures and localized power outages to cyberattacks, civil emergencies, criminal or military attacks and natural disasters.

Many businesses—especially small- and mid-sized organizations—neglect to develop a reliable, practicable disaster recovery plan. Without such a plan, they have little protection from the impact of significantly disruptive events.

Infrastructure failure can cost as much as  USD 100,000 per hour  (link resides outside IBM), and critical application failure costs can range from USD 500,000 to USD 1 million per hour. Many businesses cannot recover from such losses. More than 40% of small businesses will not re-open after experiencing a disaster, and among those that do, an additional 25% will fail within the first year after the crisis. Disaster recovery planning can dramatically reduce these risks.

Disaster recovery planning involves strategizing, planning, deploying appropriate technology, and continuous testing. Maintaining backups of your data is a critical component of disaster recovery planning, but a backup and recovery process alone does not constitute a full disaster recovery plan.

Disaster recovery also involves ensuring that adequate storage and compute is available to maintain robust failover and failback procedures.  Failover  is the process of offloading workloads to backup systems so that production processes and end-user experiences are disrupted as little as possible.  Failback  involves switching back to the original primary systems.

Read our article to learn more information about  the important distinction between backup and disaster recovery planning .

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Business continuity planning creates systems and processes to ensure that all areas of your enterprise will be able to maintain essential operations or be able to resume them as quickly as possible in the event of a crisis or emergency. Disaster recovery planning is the subset of business continuity planning that focuses on recovering IT infrastructure and systems.

Business impact analysis

The creation of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan begins with business impact analysis. When performing this analysis, you’ll create a series of detailed disaster scenarios that can then be used to predict the size and scope of the losses you’d incur if certain business processes were disrupted. What if your customer service call center was destroyed by fire, for instance? Or an earthquake struck your headquarters?

This will allow you to identify the areas and functions of the business that are the most critical and enable you to determine how much downtime each of these critical functions could tolerate. With this information in hand, you can begin to create a plan for how the most critical operations could be maintained in various scenarios.

IT disaster recovery planning should follow from and support business continuity planning. If, for instance, your business continuity plan calls for customer service representatives to work from home in the aftermath of a call center fire, what types of hardware, software, and IT resources would need to be available to support that plan?

Risk analysis

Assessing the likelihood and potential consequences of the risks your business faces is also an essential component of disaster recovery planning. As cyberattacks and ransomware become more prevalent, it’s critical to understand the general cybersecurity risks that all enterprises confront today as well as the risks that are specific to your industry and geographical location.

For a variety of scenarios, including natural disasters, equipment failure, insider threats, sabotage, and employee errors, you’ll want to evaluate your risks and consider the overall impact on your business. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What financial losses due to missed sales opportunities or disruptions to revenue-generating activities would you incur?
• What kinds of damage would your brand’s reputation undergo? How would customer satisfaction be impacted?
• How would employee productivity be impacted? How many labor hours might be lost?
• What risks might the incident pose to human health or safety?
• Would progress towards any business initiatives or goals be impacted? How?

Prioritizing applications

Not all workloads are equally critical to your business’s ability to maintain operations, and downtime is far more tolerable for some applications than it is for others. Separate your systems and applications into three tiers, depending on how long you could stand to have them be down and how serious the consequences of data loss would be.

• Mission-critical:  Applications whose functioning is essential to your business’s survival.
• Important:  Applications for which you could tolerate relatively short periods of downtime.
• Non-essential:  Applications you could temporarily replace with manual processes or do without.

Documenting dependencies

The next step in disaster recovery planning is creating a complete inventory of your hardware and software assets. It’s essential to understand critical application interdependencies at this stage. If one software application goes down, which others will be affected?

Designing resiliency—and disaster recovery models—into systems as they are initially built is the best way to manage application interdependencies. It’s all too common in today’s  microservices -based architectures to discover processes that can’t be initiated when other systems or processes are down, and vice versa. This is a challenging situation to recover from, and it’s vital to uncover such problems when you have time to develop alternate plans for your systems and processes—before an actual disaster strikes.

Establishing recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives, and recovery consistency objectives

By considering your risk and business impact analyses, you should be able to establish objectives for how long you’d need it to take to bring systems back up, how much data you could stand to use, and how much data corruption or deviation you could tolerate.

Your recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of time it should take to restore application or system functioning following a service disruption.

Your recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum age of the data that must be recovered in order for your business to resume regular operations. For some businesses, losing even a few minutes’ worth of data can be catastrophic, while those in other industries may be able to tolerate longer windows.

A recovery consistency objective (RCO) is established in the service-level agreement (SLA) for continuous data protection services. It is a metric that indicates how many inconsistent entries in business data from recovered processes or systems are tolerable in disaster recovery situations, describing business data integrity across complex application environments.

Regulatory compliance issues

All disaster recovery software and solutions that your enterprise have established must satisfy any data protection and security requirements that you’re mandated to adhere to. This means that all data backup and failover systems must be designed to meet the same standards for ensuring data confidentiality and integrity as your primary systems.

At the same time, several regulatory standards stipulate that all businesses must maintain disaster recovery and/or business continuity plans. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), for instance, requires all publicly held firms in the U.S. to maintain copies of all business records for a minimum of five years. Failure to comply with this regulation (including neglecting to establish and test appropriate data backup systems) can result in significant financial penalties for companies and even jail time for their leaders.

Choosing technologies

Backups serve as the foundation upon which any solid disaster recovery plan is built. In the past, most enterprises relied on tape and spinning disks (HDD) for backups, maintaining multiple copies of their data and storing at least one at an offsite location.

In today’s always-on digitally transforming world, tape backups in offsite repositories often cannot achieve the RTOs necessary to maintain business-critical operations. Architecting your own disaster recovery solution involves replicating many of the capabilities of your production environment and will require you to incur costs for support staff, administration, facilities, and infrastructure. For this reason, many organizations are turning to cloud-based backup solutions or full-scale Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) providers.

Choosing recovery site locations

Building your own disaster recovery  data center  involves balancing several competing objectives. On the one hand, a copy of your data should be stored somewhere that’s geographically distant enough from your headquarters or office locations that it won’t be affected by the same seismic events, environmental threats, or other hazards as your main site. On the other hand, backups stored offsite always take longer to restore from than those located on-premises at the primary site, and network latency can be even greater across longer distances.

Continuous testing and review

Simply put, if your disaster recovery plan has not been tested, it cannot be relied upon. All employees with relevant responsibilities should participate in the disaster recovery test exercise, which may include maintaining operations from the failover site for a period of time.

If performing comprehensive disaster recovery testing is outside your budget or capabilities, you can also schedule a “tabletop exercise” walkthrough of the test procedures, though you should be aware that this kind of testing is less likely to reveal anomalies or weaknesses in your DR procedures—especially the presence of previously undiscovered application interdependencies—than a full test.

As your hardware and software assets change over time, you’ll want to be sure that your disaster recovery plan gets updated as well. You’ll want to periodically review and revise the plan on an ongoing basis.

The IBM Knowledge Center provides an  example of a disaster recovery plan .

Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) is one of the most popular and fast-growing managed IT service offerings available today. Your vendor will document RTOs and RPOs in a service-level agreement (SLA) that outlines your downtime limits and application recovery expectations.

DRaaS vendors typically provide cloud-based failover environments. This model offers significant cost savings compared with maintaining redundant dedicated hardware resources in your own data center. Contracts are available in which you pay a fee for maintaining failover capabilities plus the per-use costs of the resources consumed in a disaster recovery situation. Your vendor will typically assume all responsibility for configuring and maintaining the failover environment.

Disaster recovery service offerings differ from vendor to vendor. Some vendors define their offering as a comprehensive, all-in-one solution, while others offer piecemeal services ranging from single application restoration to full data center replication in the cloud. Some offerings may include disaster recovery planning or testing services, while others will charge an additional consulting fee for these offerings.

Be sure that any enterprise software applications you rely on are supported, as are any public cloud providers that you’re working with. You’ll also want to ensure that application performance is satisfactory in the failover environment, and that the failover and failback procedures have been well tested.

If you have already built an on-premises disaster recovery (DR) solution, it can be challenging to evaluate the costs and benefits of maintaining it versus moving to a monthly DRaaS subscription instead.

Most on-premises DR solutions will incur costs for hardware, power, labor for maintenance and administration, software, and network connectivity. In addition to the upfront capital expenditures involved in the initial setup of your DR environment, you’ll need to budget for regular software upgrades. Because your DR solution must remain compatible with your primary production environment, you’ll want to ensure that your DR solution has the same software versions. Depending upon the specifics of your licensing agreement, this might effectively double your software costs.

Not only can moving to a DRaaS subscription reduce your hardware and software expenditures, it can lower your labor costs by moving the burden of maintaining the failover site to the vendor.

If you’re considering third-party DRaaS solutions, you’ll want to make sure that the vendor has the capacity for cross-regional multi-site backups. If a significant weather event like a hurricane impacted your primary office location, would the failover site be far enough away to remain unaffected by the storm? Also, would the vendor have adequate capacity to meet the combined needs of all its customers in your area if many were impacted at the same time? You’re trusting your DRaaS vendor to meet RTOs and RPOs in times of crisis, so look for a service provider with a strong reputation for reliability.

Read “ Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) vs. Disaster Recovery (DR): Which Do You Need? ” for a comparative overview of both solutions.

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Disaster Recovery Plan Templates

By Andy Marker | November 26, 2018

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In this article, you’ll find the most useful disaster plan templates, available for download in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF formats. Customize the free templates to fit your business needs so you can maintain productivity and operations in the event of a disaster.

Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Use this template to document and track all critical operations, personnel contact information, and key procedures to perform in the event of a disaster or business disruption. Use the designated space to record critical information, like the backup process, recovery sites, and restoration steps. This template is available for download in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF formats.

Download Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Word | PowerPoint | PDF  | Smartsheet

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Disaster Risk Reduction Management Plan Template

Use this template to record the most essential information your organization needs in order to effectively gauge risks. Within the disaster risk reduction management plan, you’ll find space to detail risk severity and likelihood and outline it on a visual chart. Use this template to stay on top of risks and detail how to handle any disaster or disruption, no matter the severity.

Download Disaster Risk Reduction Management Plan Template

Excel  | PDF  | Smartsheet

IT Disaster Plan Template

This template outlines the specific steps for continuing business operations and recovery in the IT field. Space is included to document IT objectives, key IT personnel and all necessary contact information, recovery plan overview, and emergency response teams. Available in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF formats, this template serves as a blueprint for recovering from all IT disruptions. .

Download IT Disaster Plan Template

Word | PowerPoint | PDF

Data Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Use this template to document the process for recovering key data after a disaster or disruption in business operations. With space to list a statement of intent, emergency response processes, financial and legal information, and recovery plan practice and implementation, this template will aid in the restoration of all critical business data.

Download Data Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Disaster Recovery Communication Plan Template

This disaster recovery communication plan template will help you identify the core communications across team members in the event of a disaster. This template provides space to assign responsibilities, identify stakeholders, and set up a proper response plan. This template is available in both Microsoft Word and PDF formats.

Download Disaster Recovery Communication Plan Template

Payroll Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Plan, track, and manage a disaster that affects the payroll process of your organization and hinders normal HR operations. You can use this template to detail key contact information, disaster recovery teams, and emergency alert and activation measures dealing with a disaster that affects typical payroll operations. This customizable template is available in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF formats.

Download Payroll Disaster Recovery Plan Template

School Disaster Management Plan Template

In the event of a disaster or emergency situation at a school, use this template to plan the exact details involved in the response, mitigation, and recovery plan. Manage all risks that could potentially plague schools, such as site security or power outages. With space to document a full risk assessment, a preparedness plan, and response actions, your school will be fully prepared.

Download School Disaster Management Plan Template

Disaster Management Plan Template

Use this comprehensive template to detail the response and management plan of your organization after a disaster strikes. With space to include an outline of your overall disaster recovery plan, key contact information, disaster recovery procedures, and alternate recovery sites, this template enables you to manage any catastrophe that may affect your organization.

Download Disaster Management Plan Template

Simple Disaster Recovery Plan for Small Businesses

This template offers a simple yet comprehensive recovery plan for small businesses when a disaster or emergency situation interrupts typical activity. You’ll find space to outline everything from recovery plans to backup procedures, and even disaster site rebuilding and relocation plans. This template is available for download in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF formats.

Download Simple Disaster Recovery Plan for Small Businesses

SaaS Disaster Recovery Plan Template

This template is specifically designed for SaaS organizations to plan, manage, and assess the damage after a disaster occurs. Outline key objectives, provide a detailed overview, and assign responsibilities across emergency and disaster response teams with this comprehensive template available in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF formats.

Download SaaS Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Disaster Drill Evaluation Template

Use this template during and after a disaster drill to evaluate the effectiveness of your organization’s plan. Record the type of disaster the drill is for, drill initiation and complete times, emergency response team accuracy, and lessons learned. Download and customize for your business needs, available in both Microsoft Word and PDF formats.

Download Disaster Drill Evaluation Template

Excel | Word | PDF

Disaster Call Tree Template

Streamline the process of phone communication when an emergency occurs. Use this template to detail the person responsible for starting the call tree, as well as all of the people who then contact others to effectively and quickly alert all team members of the disaster.

Download Disaster Call Tree Template

Excel | Word | PowerPoint | PDF

Manufacturing Disaster Recovery Plan Template

In the event of a disaster that affects the normal manufacturing operations, use this template to outline the critical details needed to restore manufacturing. With space to document critical personnel responsibilities, contingency operations, backup locations, and more, manufacturing teams can continue or relocate operations to maintain normal functions as quickly as possible.

Download Manufacturing Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Disaster Recovery Runbook

Use this template to document the steps to recovery from a disaster. You can apply this template across a multitude of business functions or teams. Easily document key details like communication strategies, disaster declaration and response procedures, infrastructure overviews, and restoration details in one place. This template is available for download in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF formats.

Download Disaster Recovery Runbook

Application Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Use this template to document specific steps for recovering from a disaster or business disruption. There is space to include policy statements, contact information, and disaster and emergency response teams and procedures. This template is available to customize and download in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF formats.

Download Application Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Law Firm Disaster Recovery Plan Template

This template offers specific recovery procedures and processes associated specifically with law firms. Document disaster response steps, personnel losses, new employee training, and office space information to effectively tackle the aftermath of a disaster that plagues a law company. This template is available for download in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF formats.

Download Law Firm Disaster Recovery Plan Template

What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a step-by-step procedure that outlines how a business or organization will recover from disrupted systems, operations, processes, or networks. The aim of a DRP is to identify critical systems or procedures, prioritize recovery time objectives (RTOs), document key personnel contact information, and outline any necessary policies to follow in the event of a disaster.

What Is the Purpose of a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A DRP is an essential document for any business or organization, as it ensures that all normal business processes, infrastructure, and applications continue to operate when a major disaster strikes. Usually, a disaster recovery plan is included as part of the overall business impact analysis .

Additionally, the plan provides details for responding to unplanned incidents, which can include cyber attacks, environmental or natural disasters (flood, earthquake, landslide, volcano, tornado, etc.), power disruptions, fires, employee errors, hardware or software failures, terrorism or sabotage, bomb or shooter threats, and more.

A DRP can also minimize the negative impacts of disasters by helping to ensure that all business locations are kept safe. In addition to all of these positive effects of having a DRP, it also helps with the following:

• Ensure employees and team members can react rapidly and restore activity effectively, in light of an emergency or disaster.
• Capture, summarize, and organize critical information needed to restore business operations.
• Develop, test, and document a detailed, easy-to-understand plan.
• Secure contingency plans, and ensure they are cost effective.
• Build resilience within the business.
• Identify responsibilities of each team member, and outline disaster practices to ensure effectiveness.
• Prepare and respond to emergencies most likely to plague certain business, teams, or roles.
• Ensure the overall prosperity and survival of the business.

Most businesses cannot afford to be non-profitable and lose critical operations for an extended period of time. DRPs help to ensure that all operations can be restored in a quick, responsive manner.

Steps For Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan

When you are writing your disaster recovery plan, start by conducting a thorough business impact analysis to identify your organization’s most essential parts or critical services and how a disaster might affect them. Assess the risk and impact associated with losing business functions in a disaster.

Look at historical or company background information to determine if any disasters have affected the organization in the past, and how they were consequently handled. Perform a gap analysis to compare what is currently being done to prevent or handle a disaster against what should be done, and see if there are missing components. Next, identify any existing preventive controls to mitigate disasters.

From there, you can start creating a disaster recovery plan by following these steps:

• Develop recovery strategies.
• Obtain management commitment and authorization to proceed with DRP creation.
• Classify and prioritize business operations.
• Set the scope of the DRP, either in covering a whole business, specific teams, or individual people.
• Develop the cost estimate and scheduling of the plan to share with key stakeholders.
• Determine supplies, equipment, and other infrastructure that must be maintained during a disaster.
• Establish an emergency communication system, usually through a call tree, and include support services and assistance information.
• Document emergency response actions and internal recovery strategies, and designate specific teams to carry them out, as well as dependent processes that must be handled in a particular order.
• Determine data and records backup and data restoration times to ensure timely IT recovery.
• Designate specific phases of your DRP, such as a response phase, resumption phase, and restoration phase.
• Identify “hot” and “cold” sites, when necessary.
• Plan an evacuation route.
• Include detailed instructions and contact information in the case of a medical emergency.
• Determine a comprehensive plan to rebuild a disaster site.
• Determine a hazard assessment to minimize exposure to risks and dangers.
• Create an emergency checklist to have on-hand when a disaster strikes.
• Conduct tests and trainings of the DRP.
• Perform an annual review of your DRP and document any necessary changes in the plan.

Who Are the Resources Involved in a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A DRP is comprised of many different human resources who are leveraged when a disaster or emergency strikes. These participants are usually grouped into teams to cover a variety of important responsibilities included in a DRP.

The plan development team helps craft the plan and assigns responsibilities to the other resources. The IT and application teams deal with disaster strategies that disrupt that portion of the business, and the emergency response team focuses on the overall emergency response process of the entire organization.

Within the emergency response team is a primary crisis manager and a company spokesperson who both focus on communicating and acting on emergency response procedures. An emergency contact helps in altering the rest of the business of the disaster, specifically to vendors or suppliers who may work remotely.

Tips For Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan

Because a DRP is an important document for any business or organization to have, creating the most accurate, clear, and actionable plan can be daunting. The following tips can help:

• Establish clearly defined roles for each team member.
• Get support and buy-in from senior management.
• Keep the wording and process description simple.
• Review results with business units.
• Be flexible and accept suggestions regarding all parts of the DRP.
• Plan for emergencies most likely to happen where you live, or according to your business.
• Detail what to do in the event of lost communication, evacuation, and safety threats.
• Make sure you have a strong communication plan across your organization.
• Always plan and prepare for the worst case scenario.
• Conduct extensive risk assessments to ensure you are covering all your bases.
• Consider the specific needs or accommodations of all employees.
• Organize your team and perform practice plans before a disaster actually strikes.

Once you have completed the plan, ask the following questions to ensure that your DRP is coherent, comprehensive, and easy to implement:

• Are all employees able to execute the plan, and is everyone aware of their role?
• Are backup procedures detailed, and are they accessible within a desired timeline?
• Are there specific contingency operations in place if one of the primary procedures fails?
• Is the recovery time objective and recovery point objective (RPO) practical for your business and all of your team members?
• Can systems be restored before an excessive amount of revenue or data is lost?

Examples of Effective Disaster Recovery Plans and Additional Resources

For more direction in creating the most appropriate and actionable DRP for your business, refer to these recovery plan examples to gain familiarity and understanding of how to write and what to include in a DRP.

• MIT Disaster Recovery Plan : MIT outlines all critical components of a DRP, including purpose of plan, disaster response, disaster detection, and business continuity teams.
• IBM Disaster Recovery Plan : IBM clearly documents key details of their business to minimize the effect of a disaster, including recovery procedures, recovery sites, major goals, and plan testing.

To gain an even better idea of how to create the best disaster recovery plan, and detail why every business should have one, refer to these helpful resources and reports:

• NIST Special Publication 800-34
• EMC IT Downtime Report
• Computer Security Resource Center
• Guide to Test, Training, and Exercise Programs for IT Plans & Capabilities
• Building an Information Technology Security Awareness & Training Program
• FEMA: “Emergency Management Guide for Business and Industry”

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The 11 Best Free Disaster Recovery Plan Templates Online

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The editors at Solutions Review have compiled this list of the best free disaster recovery plan templates available online.

With cyber-attacks and natural disasters threatening your data at every turn, being prepared with a disaster recovery plan is your best defense. Having a plan can prevent debilitating data and financial loss and give you peace of mind while running your business. Creating a disaster recovery plan from scratch is a daunting task. Luckily, there are free examples of these plans online. Instead of having to search for one that works for you, the editors at Solutions Review have put together a record of the 11 best free disaster recovery plan templates online, listed below in no particular order.

The Best Free Disaster Recover Plan Templates Online

Search disaster recovery.

OUR TAKE:   Search Disaster Recovery offers a few different kinds of recovery plans, spanning business impact analysis, pandemic recovery, and business continuity. However, their IT disaster recovery plan offers a comprehensive step-by-step guide to prepare for the worst. In addition to step-by-step instructions, this template also helps practitioners to create their own table of contents for their disaster recovery plan, allowing them to easily identify key issues to address.

OUR TAKE:   IBM separates its plan into 13 sections of what is necessary for disaster recovery. If you feel confident in some areas, but less so in others, you can pick and choose which sections would be the most useful for you. IBM also offers examples of each section, enabling disaster recovery professionals to easily understand the best way to approach their recovery strategies. The 13 sections that make up this template include, major goals of a DR plan, personnel, application profile, disaster recovery procedures, and recovery plan for mobile sites, among others.

OUR TAKE:   Ontrack, a tech blog, posted their own disaster recovery plan template. It allows you to personalize your plan by filling out the template, while also offering tips in the headings of the subsections. With its template, Ontrack aims to help small businesses become comfortable with the building blocks of a disaster recovery plan and to think realistically about what it would take to resume normal business operations after a severe IT disaster.

Adams State College

OUR TAKE:  Adams State College has made its plan public online. While it applies to the college specifically, the plan is so extensive that anyone looking to create their own recovery plan could glean from it as an example. Though this template has not been updated for some time, it is still a comprehensive outline useful as a starting point for anyone beginning to develop a DR strategy

• Disaster Recovery Plan Template

OUR TAKE:   Disaster Recovery Plan Template offers, as one would expect, disaster recovery plan templates. Their basic recovery plan provides templates to make the plan specific to your needs, as well as step-by-step instructions that apply to all businesses. The template was created through extensive research on disaster recovery planning and emergency management of records and information programs.

The Council on Foundations

OUR TAKE:   The Council on Foundations provides a template that is completely comprehensive; assigning disaster roles to employees based on their job, outlining business impact analysis, and building evacuation procedures. Additionally, the Council on Foundations also offers individual templates to use in conjunction with its full Disaster Preparedness and Recovery Plan.

SANS Institute

OUR TAKE:   SANS Institute has a plan that provides an outline of what should happen in a disaster situation. If you need light structure or something to fall back on when creating your own plan, this one would be helpful. The SANS Institute’s plan also provides a discussion of the culture and employee education surrounding disaster recovery and risk avoidance.

OUR TAKE: Evolve IP designed this template to help Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) practitioners with the process of capturing and organizing the critical information needed to ensure that IT operations are in a position to survive when a disruption occurs. This template is meant as a guide only. Users should review it carefully to determine whether it appropriately fits their specific needs.

Disaster Recovery Plan Templates

OUR TAKE: In addition to offering a basic disaster recovery plan, Disaster Recovery Plan Templates also offers a recovery plan specific to IT. This provides an outline of what should occur in IT should a disaster strike. The plan is divided up into 13 sections, which include determining the scope of your plan, definitions of disaster, framework design, administrative processes, and testing processes, among others.

Southern Oregon University

OUR TAKE: Like Adams State College, Southern Oregon University has a public disaster recovery plan . While again, this plan is specific to the university, it offers guidelines on how to handle disaster recovery. The university places emphasis on testing its plan, stating that it is reviewed and updated every year by IT staff, and then those updates are approved by the organization’s chief information officer.

DisasterRecovery.org

OUR TAKE:   DisasterRecovery.org offers a free disaster recovery plan template, as well as a business continuity plan template . Additionally, the site offers emergency management, incident management, and threat plans, as well as a look at a cloud-based disaster recovery solution. This makes it a perfect place for organizations in their nascent stages to start to prepare for a disaster.

Being prepared with a disaster recovery plan is one of the best ways to maintain business continuity and protect your data, so why not get a jump start on it for free? If you find a plan from this list, consult our Disaster Recovery as a Service Buyer’s Guide, Backup and Disaster Recovery Buyer’s Guide, or our Data Protection Vendor Map for more information on disaster recovery planning.

This article was written by Tess Hanna on June 1, 2022

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Tess Hanna is an editor and writer at Solutions Review covering Backup and Disaster Recovery, Data Storage, Cloud Computing, and Network Monitoring. Recognized by Onalytica in the 2021 "Who's Who in Data Management," and "Who's Who in Automation" reports. You can contact her at [email protected]

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Creating an IT disaster recovery plan template: 6 steps with example for guidance

Imagine this: your critical IT systems go down. Servers crash, data becomes inaccessible, and your business grinds to a halt. In today's digital world, such a scenario can be devastating. But there's hope! A well-crafted IT disaster recovery plan template is your insurance policy against unforeseen disruptions, ensuring a swift and smooth recovery.

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) template outlines the sequence of tasks your organization will take to recover applications from a disaster, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. But creating one from scratch can seem daunting. That's where a DRP plan template comes in – a pre-defined framework to leverage across all of your applications and services.

What is an IT disaster recovery plan template?

An IT disaster recovery plan template is a crucial runbook that outlines the end-to-end process and sequence of steps your organization will take to recover applications from a disruptive event, such as a power outage, cyber attack, or hardware failure. Having a well-defined IT disaster recovery plan template ensures you have comprehensive and efficient application recovery plans across your important business services that are ready to execute in the event of a disaster. This article guides you through creating a comprehensive IT disaster recovery plan template, including essential steps, valuable examples, and practical guidance for crafting an effective plan.

Why use a disaster recovery plan template?

Creating a disaster recovery plan from the ground up takes time and resources. A template provides a solid framework, ensuring you cover all the essential elements. It helps you:

• Save time: Focus on customizing the template to your specific needs instead of reinventing the wheel.
• Maintain consistency: Ensure a clear and well-organized IT DRP template structure that is easy for everyone to understand. ‍
• Don't miss anything: The template acts as a checklist, guaranteeing you address critical IT disaster recovery plan procedures . An IT disaster recovery plan checklist is an important guide which outlines essential steps and procedures for organizations to rapidly restore IT systems and data following a disaster.

How to develop an IT Disaster recovery plan

Organizations typically orient their technology estate around applications or services. These are groupings of individual technology services (such as application code, compute resources or a database), that underpin the provisioning of a business service. It makes sense, therefore, to define recovery plans at this level. This allows for individual application-based recovery, but also to recover hundreds or thousands of applications when faced with a total loss scenario.

Runbook templates are the mechanism for defining recovery plans. Think of templates as the definition of what you want to execute and run, with a runbook being the resulting actionable set of tasks that you actually execute and run.

Defining a template at a service or application level allows you to define a common recovery approach across all of your applications and then create recovery plans specific to that application. Augmenting the definition of your recovery plan with configuration management database (CMDB) data ensures a rich description of the actions and activities required to recover your application.

Furthermore, having added organization-specific data to each recovery plan allows these plans to be executed in combination with each other, to effect the recovery of a larger logical unit, such as an important business service, cloud availability zone, or datacenter.

Building your IT disaster recovery plan template: Step-by-step with examples

Proactive planning is paramount in mitigating the chaos and financial losses associated with IT-related disasters and outages. Building an IT disaster recovery plan (DRP) template provides a clear, step-by-step guide for your IT teams to follow in the event of an outage. Automating specific tasks can save valuable time and minimize errors during a critical situation. 

By following a structured approach and incorporating valuable automations, you can construct a DR plan template that safeguards your organization's operations and fosters a culture of preparedness.

Here we have broken down the creation of a DR plan template into manageable steps and concluded with an IT disaster recovery plan example :

1. Define scope and objectives: 

• Incident description: Outline the types of disasters you might face, like power outages, cyber attacks, or floods, and their potential impact on your operations.
• Scope: Identify your critical IT assets. This includes applications, data, hardware, and whether they reside on-premises or in the cloud (e.g. customer databases, financial applications running on AWS).
• Recovery goals: Set recovery time objectives (RTOs) - the acceptable downtime before getting systems back online. Prioritize critical systems with tighter RTOs (e.g. one hour for an e-commerce platform). Non-critical systems can have longer RTOs (e.g. 24 hours for internal communications).
• Template owner: Assign a point person responsible for maintaining and updating the DRP.
• Revision history: Track approvals and changes made to the DR plan template over time.

2. Initial response: 

• Alert verification: Define procedures for confirming the disaster's nature and severity. This might involve verifying system logs or contacting affected personnel.
• Communication: Outline clear protocols for notifying stakeholders and activating the disaster recovery (DR) team. This could involve email alerts, SMS messages, or conference calls.
• Establish protocols: Define clear communication channels for different disaster scenarios (email, phone calls, SMS) based on criticality.
• Contact information: Include a list of key personnel (IT staff, managers) and their contact details.
• Automation: Build automated notifications to expedite the response process. For instance, automated emails or SMS messages can be triggered upon a system outage to alert the IT Team.

3. Recovery phase: 

• Systems recovery: Outline steps to restore or fail over affected systems and applications to functionality. This might involve restoring from backups, activating failover procedures, or manually restarting critical services.
• Data recovery: Define the tasks for restoring critical data from backups or alternative sources. This could involve restoring databases, file servers, or individual user files from backups.
• Application recovery: Specify steps for resuming critical applications and services. This might involve restarting application servers, reconfiguring databases, or deploying new instances from backups.

4. Testing and validation: Ensuring readiness

• Test environment: Establish a dedicated test environment to simulate and rehearse disaster recovery plans and practice using the DR plan template runbook.
• Regular testing: Schedule periodic testing of the DR plan template to identify any issues or gaps in the plan. This could involve quarterly simulations or tabletop exercises.

5. Maintenance and review

• Post-mortem review: Analyze the test results and update the IT disaster recovery plan template based on lessons learned. This helps refine communication protocols, identify resource gaps, or improve recovery procedures.
• Regular updates: Regularly update the DR plan template to reflect changes in your IT infrastructure and emerging threats.

6. Additional IT disaster recovery plan template considerations

• Dependencies: Identify any dependencies between recovery tasks and ensure they are addressed in the proper order.
• Resource allocation: Specify the resources required for each task (personnel, equipment, etc.).
• Escalation procedures: Define protocols for escalating the incident if recovery efforts stall.
• Configuration items: Integrate CMDB data from IT Service Management platforms into runbooks for a golden source of truth for configuration items.  
• Failover scripts: Leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools to automate the failover process for systems and applications to secondary environments.
• Communication platforms: Integrate with communication platforms to proactively notify stakeholders and task owners on status and activity.

IT disaster recovery plan example: A simple scenario 

Critical data center application with thousands of services failing over to a secondary site. 

IT disaster recovery plan example: Testing for when an outage strikes

• A simulated power outage causes the critical application to fail in the primary data center
• Customers and staff can no longer access the application

DR plan initiated

• The Cutover IT disaster recovery template runbook is triggered automatically (preferable) or manually.
• The DR team is informed via Microsoft Teams that the DR has been initiated

Network / Domain Name System (DNS)

• The application URL is redirected to an outage notification page for customer/user experience  

Secondary data center (DC) resources activated

• Secondary DC application recoveries are initiated
• Verify compute resources are available in secondary DC
• Pull application source code out of the repository (Github) and use an Ansible script to provision
• Validate admin access and all services are running
• Establish any security/authentication protocols as necessary (SSL, ActiveDir, etc.)
• Verify app configuration. 

Data recovery

• Create a new database structure and attach it to the new standby instance.
• Initiate recovery/rehydration of the data from backup source - the latest automated snapshot of the primary DB volume from before the outage occurred.
• Checksum original and restored data
• Functional test application and data (verify no DB corruption, etc)
• Inform wider DR team and stakeholders via Microsoft Teams that application and DB are functional/ready for traffic
• Redirect application traffic via DNS to the secondary site
• Validate traffic is being properly redirected

Back to normal

• The application continues to operate in the secondary DC until the primary DC is fully functional again.
• Recovery complete

Regulatory audit reports and post-mortem

• Generate regulatory audit report of test for compliance
• Review post-event details for future improvements

Cutover for your disaster recovery plan templates

Whether your systems are cloud-native, hybrid or on-premises you need to ensure resilience while meeting regulatory compliance requirements. Cutover standardizes and automates your IT disaster recovery plan templates. With Cutover’s automated runbooks you can bridge the gap between your teams, processes and technology to increase efficiency and reduce risks.

• Create standardization across your application operations with a centralized template repository
• Standardize and automate your global communications in one place, so the right people are engaged at the right time
• Visualize critical paths and gain real-time visibility and reporting into runbook execution
• Meet regulatory compliance with the immutable and auto-generated audit log
• Identify areas for process improvement with the post-execution analytics
• Extend the value of your existing technology by seamlessly integrating third-party solutions and applications with the REST API

Cutover’s Collaborative Automation SaaS platform enables enterprises to simplify complexity, streamline work, and increase visibility. Cutover’s automated runbooks connect teams, technology, and systems, increasing efficiency and reducing risk in IT DR   and cyber recovery , cloud migration , release management , and technology implementation. Cutover is trusted by world-leading institutions, including the three largest US banks and three of the world’s five largest investment banks. 

Book a demo to see Cutover’s DRP templates and runbook capabilities for yourself.

Runbook examples: IT disaster recovery, cloud migration and technology implementation

Scalable disaster recovery techniques in cloud computing, implementing disaster recovery in the cloud: strategies used by enterprises, get the latest cutover updates and insights in a monthly newsletter.

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How to Create a Network Disaster Recovery Plan

This article explores what a network disaster recovery plan (NDRP) is, why it’s important, and how to create an effective one.

• Cost Optimization
• Disaster Recovery

Apr 30, 2024

A network disaster recovery plan (NDRP) is a documented approach that helps businesses minimize downtime and prevent data loss due to a cyberattack, natural disaster, or other unforeseen event.

When Colonial Pipeline fell victim to a devastating cyberattack in May 2021, the company’s operations came to a standstill, leading to widespread fuel shortages throughout the eastern United States. Even with backups, it was six days before the energy company was able to get its systems up and running again.

Downtime is enormously expensive. Most estimates put the average cost at a few thousand dollars per minute. In some industries, that number is considerably higher, with the brokerage industry topping the list at around $108,000 per minute of downtime . 

That’s why having a robust network disaster recovery plan (NDRP) is more important than ever. Cyberattacks, including ransomware , are on the rise. A viable NDRP is an essential component of any corporate risk mitigation program because it allows for rapid recovery from incidents that could otherwise lead to crippling business disruptions .

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What Is a Network Disaster Recovery Plan?

A network disaster recovery plan is a documented, structured approach to fully restoring IT operations damaged by a cyberattack, natural disaster, or other unforeseen event. Its primary purpose is to minimize downtime and prevent data loss by restoring network capabilities and services as quickly and effectively as possible.

Basic Elements of a Network Disaster Recovery Plan

Key components of a network disaster recovery plan include:

• Risk assessment: This includes the identification of potential threats such as cyberattacks, hardware failure, natural disasters, or localized events like fires or flooding. The plan should include an assessment of the likelihood and detailed impact of each scenario.
• Recovery objectives: The NDRP should include key measurable outcomes such as recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) which define the maximum tolerable downtime and maximum allowable data loss, respectively.
• Inventory of assets: An effective NDRP should include an inventory of the various network components essential to maintaining business operations, such as hardware, software, data, and connectivity.
• Recovery strategies: The plan should outline the specific procedures necessary for recovering network services and components, addressing each scenario identified in the risk assessment. Typically, this will involve the use of redundant systems, disaster recovery as a service , and resilient data storage architectures designed to support rapid and complete recovery.
• Communication plan: Your NDRP should specify how communications should be handled during a disaster, detailing how employees, customers, regulators, and others will be kept up to date.
• Roles and responsibilities: This section defines the roles that individuals and teams will play throughout the recovery process. It should also specify the responsibilities of various parties for maintaining a state of readiness.
• Testing and training: If you’ve never tested your disaster recovery plans, then you don’t really know whether they’ll work in an emergency. Organizations should train regularly, test specific procedures, and conduct periodic drills to ensure that the plan works as intended.
• Maintenance and update schedule: It’s critical to update the network disaster recovery plan on a regular basis to keep it current with both technological and organizational changes.

Benefits of Implementing an NDRP

A network disaster recovery plan protects your organization against downtime and data loss. The combined impact of missed productivity, lost revenue, customer attrition, and reputational damage can be profound. 

By minimizing downtime and ensuring a faster resumption of services, an NDRP helps mitigate financial losses. Prolonged outages can lead to direct revenue loss, contractual penalties, and lost opportunities, all of which can be avoided or minimized with an effective recovery plan.

For instance, consider what might happen to a consumer goods company that operates an e-commerce storefront, along with manufacturing and distribution centers to serve both end users and retailers. Faced with a crippling cyberattack, the company’s website is down. Frustrated customers voice their disappointment on popular social media sites and may take their business to the competition.

The company can no longer process orders for retailers, either. In fact, a recent batch of orders was lost altogether, leaving the company with no way to know what was ordered by whom. The company’s most important sales channels are left with insufficient inventory, leading to even more lost revenue. 

A well-crafted NDRP helps minimize downtime, enabling rapid recovery from disasters. It helps prevent data loss, ensuring that critical business information remains secure and recoverable, even under adverse conditions. 

For businesses subject to regulations or customer compliance standards that require disaster recovery, an NDRP helps ensure compliance, prevent regulatory action, and avoid contractual penalties.

Knowing that an organization has a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place instills confidence and trust in its stakeholders, customers, and partners, reinforcing the company’s reputation for reliability and preparedness.

Overall, a network disaster recovery plan is an essential part of an organization’s strategy to ensure business continuity , safeguard assets, and maintain a high level of service regardless of circumstances. A robust NDRP limits risk exposure and gets your company back up and running quickly in the event of a cyberattack or disaster.

Steps to Create an Effective NDRP

An effective network disaster recovery plan starts with a team approach, incorporating representatives from IT, individual business units, corporate security, and executive management. Corporate risk and compliance managers play a particularly important role, alongside IT.

Begin by conducting a risk assessment that addresses multiple scenarios, outlining the specific impact that various events could have on your operations. Identify critical assets, including data assets, that are essential to the business.

Establish measurable objectives. Prioritize the assets that are most essential to continued operations, setting realistic recovery targets for each one. You might decide, for example, that restoring order processing capabilities takes precedence over the restoration of marketing systems, or that manufacturing operations for certain core product lines are more important than others.

Define the means by which you will accomplish those objectives, including personnel, assets, and technologies that can support your efforts. By implementing a tiered resiliency architecture , for example, you can achieve near-instantaneous data recovery, using data that is virtually impossible for bad actors to access and erase. A robust recovery strategy hinges on your ability to apply industry-leading technology to your advantage.

Testing and Maintenance of NDRP

It’s critical to review and revise your NDRP regularly. As your technology landscape evolves, and as your organization grows and changes, your disaster recovery plan will need to adapt accordingly.

Regular training and testing are also essential. These activities help identify gaps in the plan and provide practice for the team responsible for implementing it in a real disaster. Consider the various scenarios outlined in your NDRP and develop readiness drills. These may include tabletop discussion-based exercises in which team members talk through specific scenarios, functional exercises that simulate actual disaster scenarios in a controlled environment, or full-scale drills that bring all resources and personnel into action around a highly realistic, simulated disruption.

Your network disaster recovery plan should be reviewed and updated periodically. At a bare minimum, this should take place on an annual basis. However, significant changes to your IT landscape, organizational structure, business operations, or scope should also trigger a review.  Be sure to incorporate feedback from the drills you’ve conducted since the last plan update.

Changes to the risk environment may also indicate the need for review and revision. Plan to continuously monitor and improve your NDRP, with regular testing to ensure its effectiveness.

Many companies already have some kind of disaster recovery plan in place. In too many cases, though, these documents are poorly maintained and are insufficient to fulfill their intended purpose. Today’s world is full of risks, and enterprises are increasingly dependent on sophisticated technology for core operations.

Modernize Your Network Disaster Recovery Plan with Pure Storage

To survive and thrive in a high-risk business environment, it’s critical to invest in an effective NDRP and commit the necessary resources to make it work when it’s needed. If you’re interested in high resiliency, bulletproof data protection, and rapid recovery, contact the team at Pure Storage. We specialize in cutting-edge storage solutions that keep your enterprise going, no matter what. 

Learn more about our disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering, Pure Protect™ //DRaaS , or contact our team today to schedule a demo or talk to a disaster recovery expert .

Written By: Pure Storage

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Make a Plan

DO NOT DELETE THE "EMPTY" SECTION CONTROL BELOW THIS. IT CONTAINS THE GHOST OF CLARA BARTON. 

With your family or household members, discuss how to prepare and respond to the types of emergencies that are most likely to happen where you live, learn, work and play.

Identify responsibilities for each member of your household and how you will work together as a team.

Practice as many elements of your plan as possible.

Document Your Plan with Our Free Templates

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Include Common Emergency Scenarios When You Plan

Plan for the emergencies that are most likely to happen where you live.

• Be familiar with natural disaster risks in your community.
• Consider how you will respond to emergencies that can happen anywhere, such as home fires and floods.
• Consider how you will respond to emergencies that are unique to your region, such as volcanoes, tsunamis or tornadoes.
• Think about emergencies that may require your family to shelter in place (such as a winter storm), vs. emergencies that may require evacuation (such as a hurricane).
• Consult our  emergency resource library  for tips on preparing for, responding to, and recovering from specific disasters.

Plan what to do in case you are separated during an emergency

• Right outside your home in case of a sudden emergency, such as a fire
• Outside your neighborhood, in case you cannot return home or are asked to evacuate
• Choose an out-of-area emergency contact person. It may be easier to text or call long distance if local phone lines are overloaded or out of service. Everyone should carry emergency contact information in writing and saved on their cell phones. Make sure places where your children spend time also have these contact numbers, like at school or daycare.
• How will you need to adapt your plan if they are at home?
• What will you need to do differently if they are away?

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Make cards for the whole family in case you are separated during an emergency.

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Plan what to do if you have to evacuate

• A hotel/motel
• The home of friends or relatives a safe distance away
• An evacuation shelter
• Practice evacuating your home twice a year. Grab your emergency kit, just like you will in a real emergency, then drive your planned evacuation route. Plot alternate routes on your map in case roads are impassable. Make sure you have locations and maps saved on devices such as cell phones and GPS units and on paper.
• Plan ahead for your pets. Keep a phone list of pet-friendly hotels/motels and animal shelters that are along your evacuation routes. Remember, if it’s not safe for you to stay home, it’s not safe for your pets either.

Plan for everyone in your home

Some members of your household may need special accommodation during an emergency, which means planning ahead is even more crucial.

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Read our tips  tips for reconnecting with loved ones  if you are separated during a disaster or emergency and decide which techniques your family will use.

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State seeks public input on disaster recovery plan

May 14—State officials are seeking public input on a plan for spending more than $4 million in federal funding designated for recovery from the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire and other related disasters of 2022.

An action plan from the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management proposes spending about $3.8 million to develop a "building resiliency center" in San Miguel County meant to assist rehousing efforts in the region that was devastated by the historic fire.

The plan lists examples of services such a center could provide to residents in the region, including:

* A pre-application screening to help homeowners towards a complete submittal package and streamline the issuance of a permit,

* Identification of local building contractors who are approved by the local jurisdictions and licensed through the state Regulation and Licensing Division, North Central New Mexico Economic Development Department's Contractor Database and the DHSEM's Disaster Case Management Program Contractor Database,

* Navigating insurance, and federal aid programs,

* Providing general planning assistance throughout the entire rebuild process referencing local jurisdictional zoning codes, setbacks, separation from structures, floodplain maps, and ArcGIS, and

* Support in evaluating rebuilding construction proposals. These bid reviews help determine whether the scope and pricing of construction bids are appropriate for rebuilding projects.

The funding comes from the federal Community Development Block Grant program, meant to support long-term disaster recover for "wildfires, flooding, mudflow, and straight-line winds" that prompted a federal disaster declaration in 2022 in Colfax, Mora, San Miguel, Lincoln, Los Alamos, Sandoval, and Valencia counties.

A study from the state Department of Homeland Security identified at least $249 million in "unmet recovery needs" in those counties from the 2022 fires and related disasters, according to the action plan.

The plan states "there is a higher degree of uncertainty in New Mexico's total assessed needs, based on the presence of the [Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon] Claims Office ... which is responsible for administering funding authorized under the Fire Assistance Act," noting the claims office had paid approximately $500 million of its almost $4 billion appropriation by the end of April.

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