Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

A Disaster Recovery Plan is the technical plan for restoring information systems, infrastructure and data after a disruptive failure. It names the recovery teams, the order in which systems come back, the site or service they come back on, and the procedures for restoring data from backups or replicas. It is a component of the Business Continuity Plan rather than an alternative to it: continuity keeps the business serving customers, and recovery is how the technology it depends on returns.

The DRP does not set its own targets. The Business Impact Analysis establishes the MTD for each function, and the RTO and RPO that follow from it are the requirements the recovery strategy has to meet. That is why choosing a hot site or a cold site before the analysis is finished inverts the order: the capability gets chosen before anyone has established what it needs to achieve.

Exam relevance: the distinction from the BCP is the one most commonly confused. A scenario about restoring servers, databases or a data centre is describing the DRP; one about how the organisation keeps operating while that happens is describing the BCP. A candidate is also expected to recognise that a recovery strategy which cannot meet the MTD is a failed strategy, however well it is documented.