Glossary
Disaster Recovery Plan
Disaster recovery is how you rebuild after catastrophe. How fast can you restore from backups? What's the minimum needed to operate? RTO and RPO - how much downtime and data loss can you afford?
What is Disaster Recovery Plan?
A documented process for recovering IT systems and data after a disaster, attack, or failure.
Why Should You Care?
A Disaster Recovery Plan directly determines how long your business remains offline and how much data you lose after an attack or failure. Organizations without tested RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) targets face uncontrolled downtime that can run into substantial per-hour losses, and a significant share of businesses never fully recover from a major disaster. For security teams, a plan forces the difficult choices now—which systems recover first, what is acceptable data loss—rather than improvising in crisis when those decisions carry serious consequences.
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Real-World Example
A financial institution hit by ransomware can recover its mission-critical banking systems quickly if it maintains tested, isolated backups and automated failover, whereas the same organization without those controls faces days of recovery, potential data loss, or a ransom decision. A hospital that has defined a tight RTO for its electronic health record system—because patient care degrades the moment it goes down—has made an explicit, costed choice; a hospital that never defined an RTO discovers that threshold under pressure, while staff are already improvising on paper.
How to Protect Against Disaster Recovery Plan
- 1.
Document disaster recovery procedures
- 2.
Test recovery from backups regularly
Related Terms
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