Disaster recovery (DR) planning is the methodology for developing and maintaining strategies, procedures, and technical capabilities to restore critical IT systems and data following a disruptive event. DR planning addresses scenarios including ransomware attacks, hardware failures, natural disasters, cloud provider outages, and catastrophic data loss, ensuring organizations can resume operations within defined recovery objectives.
DR planning is a subset of business continuity management, focused specifically on the technology recovery component. It works in concert with business impact analysis, risk assessment, and crisis management procedures.
DR planning begins with a business impact analysis (BIA) that identifies critical systems, their dependencies, and the financial and operational impact of downtime. This analysis establishes two key metrics for each system: Recovery Time Objective (RTO), the maximum acceptable downtime, and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time.
Based on RTO and RPO requirements, architects design recovery strategies. Hot standby sites provide near-instant failover with continuously replicated data. Warm sites maintain infrastructure ready for rapid data restoration. Cold sites provide basic facilities that require hours or days to bring online. Cloud-based DR leverages infrastructure as code and automated provisioning to create recovery environments on demand.
DR plans document detailed recovery procedures for each critical system, including step-by-step restoration instructions, dependency ordering, validation checks, and communication templates. Plans identify recovery teams, their roles, and escalation paths. Regular testing validates that procedures work as documented and that recovery objectives are achievable. Testing methods range from document reviews and tabletop exercises to full-scale failover tests.
Without tested DR plans, organizations face extended outages, permanent data loss, and potential business failure following disruptive events. Ransomware attacks have made DR planning essential for every organization. Tested recovery capabilities provide negotiating leverage during ransomware incidents and ensure that paying a ransom is a choice rather than a necessity.