Date : 27 Sep 2025

Elements of a Successful Disaster Recovery Plan

1) Risk Assessment & Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

Purpose:

Identify threat scenarios, quantify business impact, and set recovery targets.

Deliverables:

• • Threat register (cyber, ransomware, hardware, human error, region outage, supplier failure).
  • Impact dimensions: revenue, safety, regulatory, legal, brand.
  • BIA table with process ↔ application mapping, Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO), Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD), and dependencies.

2) Asset & System Inventory

Purpose:

Know exactly what must be recovered and in what order.

Deliverables:

• • Configuration Management Database (CMDB)-style sheet with: system name, tier (T0–T3), owner, environment, location/region, CPU/RAM/IOPS, Service Level Objectives (SLOs), dependencies.

3) Roles & Responsibilities

Purpose:

Remove ambiguity in a crisis.

Deliverables:

• • Incident Command System chart (Incident Commander, Operations, Comms/PR, Legal/Privacy, Forensics, App Owners).
  • RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) for key tasks.
  • 24×7 on-call roster & contact list (with escalation paths).

4) Data Backup Strategy

Purpose:

Ensure restorable, verified copies exist across failure domains.

Deliverables:

• • 3-2-1-1-0 policy: 3 copies, 2 media types, 1 offsite, 1 immutable, 0 verification errors.
  • Retention by tier (e.g., T0: 30-day Journal, daily LTR 30 days, monthly 12, yearly 7).
  • Encryption (at rest/in transit), and automated restore verification schedule.

5) DR Infrastructure

Purpose:

Define the target topology and prerequisites.

Options:

• • Hot (near-zero RTO): pre-provisioned compute, warm data, stretched networking.
  • Warm (hours): templates/images ready; scale out on failover.
  • Cold (days): rebuild from backups.

Plan elements:

• • Cross-region and cloud-to-cloud patterns (on-prem vSphere → AWS/Azure; region A → region B).
  • Network/identity: DNS, DHCP, NTP, IP ranges, VPN/Direct Connect/ExpressRoute, SSO/IdP, PKI, bastions/jump hosts.
  • Capacity: CPU/RAM/storage/IOPS, egress allowances, quota reservations, and runbook-driven right-sizing.

6) Cybersecurity Integration

Purpose:

Avoid reinfecting the DR site and maintain security telemetry.

Deliverables:

• • Clean-room restoration steps (isolated VPC/VNet, no east-west trust, ephemeral admin creds).
  • IOC (Indicators of Compromise) scanning before production cutover.
  • SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response), and EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) continuity plan.
  • Secrets/cert rotation workflow (API keys, DB passwords, TLS certs).

7) Recovery Procedures (Runbook Template)

Purpose:

Deterministic steps per application, with evidence capture.

Template:

1. 1. Pre-checks: health of DR infra, Zerto VPG status, capacity, EDR/Log collectors online.
   2. Initiate Failover: Zerto live failover or test failover (for exercises). Select consistent checkpoint.
   3. Post-restore Validation: app smoke tests, data integrity checks, dependency checks (DNS, queues, mail, identity).
   4. Security Checks: EDR/SIEM review, IOC scan results, secrets/cert rotation complete.
   5. Failback Plan: resync, schedule cutback window, data delta validation, revert routing/DNS.
   6. Evidence Capture: export reports, screenshots of tests, ticket numbers, timestamps.

8) Communication Plan

Purpose:

Keep stakeholders aligned without slowing recovery.

Deliverables:

• • Stakeholder/trigger matrix (who gets what, when a threshold is crossed—e.g., “T0 outage > 15 min”).
  • Channels: Slack/Teams bridge, SMS paging, executive brief emails, regulator/customer templates.
  • Ready-to-use snippets (internal incident start, customer advisory, regulator notice).

9) Testing & Simulation

Purpose:

Prove it works, not just that it’s documented.

Cadence:

• • Quarterly targeted exercises (T0 every quarter; T1–T2 semiannual; T3 annual).
  • Game/chaos days: inject faults (DNS failure, IAM denial, storage latency).
  • Success criteria: observed RTO/RPO vs targets, pass/fail on smoke tests, clean security scans, and documented evidence.

10) Continuous Improvement

Purpose:

Make each test/incident reduce future risk.

Deliverables:

• • PIR (Post-Incident Review) template with root cause(s), contributing factors, corrective actions, owners, deadlines.
  • Quarterly DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) refresh tied to Change Management (CAB approvals for material changes).
  • Metrics tracked over time.

Metrics (define clearly):

• • Recovery Success Rate: % of applications meeting both RTO and RPO in tests/incidents.
  • RTO Delta: Observed RTO − Target RTO (minutes).
  • Backup Verification Pass Rate: % of restore tests completed without errors.
  • Time to Declare: Incident start → DR declaration (minutes).
  • Drill Coverage: % of tiered apps drilled within policy window.
  • Mean Time to Recover (MTTR): Start of recovery → service restored (minutes).
  • Change Lead Time: Approved change → control in effect (days).