What is a disaster recovery plan (DRP)?

DRPs help ensure that businesses are prepared to face a variety of potential disasters including power outages, ransomware and malware attacks, natural disasters and more. DRPs are built around two key targets: how much downtime is tolerable (recovery time objective, or RTO) and how much data loss is tolerable (recovery point objective, or RPO).

Key components of an effective DRP include team member roles and responsibilities, risk assessments, business impact assessments and recovery objectives, data backup procedures, asset inventories, and plans for the reconstitution of operations and maintenance of the DRP document itself.

According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, data breaches cost organizations an average of USD 4.44 million. That cost varies by industry; in the healthcare industry, for example, the average cost of a data breach reached USD 7.42 million. A 2026 Splunk report found that unplanned outages cost the world’s 2,000 largest organizations about USD 300 million per year. In addition to the immediate financial costs of disasters, organizations can also suffer from reputational damage, regulatory fines and lawsuits.

A strong DRP aims to minimize both the amount of data lost and the downtime that results from a disaster.

Business continuity plans (BCP), incident response plans (IRP) and disaster recovery plans (DRP) are all playbooks for surviving a crisis and restoring normal operations.

A BCP is a comprehensive, organization-wide strategy for navigating a disaster. BCPs are focused on what the company as a whole needs to do to resume normal business operations, including where employees work, how communication is conducted during an outage and how a public relations team might address the media.

A DRP is a subset of the BCP with an information technology (IT) focus, hence why it’s sometimes called an IT disaster recovery plan (or ITDRP). A DRP includes specific guidance for risk management, restoring IT systems and recovering lost data. DRPs are largely concerned with backups, data security, failovers and the potential risks of, and solutions to, IT-related disasters.

While a DRP focuses on restoring systems and data after the immediate incident, an IRP outlines the strategy for mitigating damage during a cybersecurity incident. In many cases, an IRP is part of a larger DRP. An IRP is often maintained by a cybersecurity team, and includes instructions cybersecurity teams use to identify, contain and neutralize an active threat, such as a ransomware attack or security breach.

DRPs play a critical role in ensuring that organizations are prepared to respond effectively to a disaster. A well-maintained, detailed and thorough DRP provides clarity in the chaos of a disaster relief effort—a clear plan of action with delineated roles and responsibilities for all team members.

Benefits of an effective DRP include: 

Downtime can lead to astounding financial losses; Splunk estimates that the average outage costs Global 2000 organizations a staggering USD 15,000 per minute. The damage isn’t limited to the world’s largest companies, either. EN Computers ran the numbers for a business with 50 employees and USD 10 million in annual revenue and found that one day of downtime would cost that business nearly USD 53,000. Minimizing downtime and maintaining high availability is a fundamental goal of an effective DRP.

DRPs can reduce downtime duration and frequency through several methods. For one, a DRP lays out a specific plan of action that eliminates time that might otherwise be spent debating roles and responsibilities. A DRP also includes step-by-step technical guidelines and tools for recovery. These might include the correct order of operations for reboots, pre-tested command line scripts and domain configurations. 

Recovering from an incident can be expensive, regardless of cause or origin. According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, malicious insider attacks cost an average of USD 4.92 million. Enterprises with strong DRPs in place can significantly reduce the costs of business disruptions stemming from an unplanned incident, whether it’s an internal leak, an external malware attack or an outage from a natural disaster.

DRPs provide guidelines for mandatory backups, failsafes and failovers, which help prevent or reduce data loss during a disaster and can reduce the extent of expensive data recovery operations after a disaster.

In addition to business and data recovery costs, disasters might also carry costs related to service level agreements (SLAs). If a disaster causes an organization to breach this contract, the organization might have to pay penalties in the form of refunds or service credits to clients. Reducing downtime and minimizing attack damage helps mitigate such costs.

Cyber insurance protects organizations from the cost of digital disasters, such as ransomware demands and lost revenue from downtime. Just as home insurance often requires an inspection and working safeguards such as fire alarms, cyber insurers increasingly assess an organization’s recovery and continuity posture before quoting.

A documented, regularly tested DRP is part of what they weight, alongside controls like tested backups and an IRP. Even where a DRP isn’t strictly mandatory, maintaining and testing one can improve an organization’s risk profile and help reduce premiums. Carriers want evidence that recovery plans actually work, not just that they exist.

Businesses that operate in heavily regulated sectors such as healthcare and personal finance face heavy fines and penalties for data breaches, even those not caused by human error. Shortening response and recovery lifecycles is critical in these sectors as the amount of a financial penalty is often tied to the duration and severity of a breach. Enterprises with robust DRPs can recover more quickly and completely from an unplanned incident and face fewer fines as a result.

Disaster recovery plans will vary from organization to organization based on specific threats, regulatory requirements and resources. However, there are many commonalities among them, including:

A DRP must identify a clear delineation of roles and responsibilities for addressing a disaster. These roles typically include:

Leader or manager: The head of the disaster recovery team, tasked with coordinating different groups and making key decisions to oversee the recovery.

Business liaison: The representative who communicates with non-IT departments about the state of the recovery process.

IT operations: The administrators who execute the technical recovery and restoration of data and IT infrastructure. These roles can be further specified based on the personnel of the organization in question, and might include roles such as database administrator, cybersecurity lead and network lead.

Communications: The person in each department who will communicate progress, obstacles and results to the DRP leader.

Alternates: Each named leader should have an alternate. This is to avoid a situation in which the DRP leader happens to be on vacation or is otherwise unreachable during a crisis. It’s vital to know who carries these responsibilities.

DRPs include a section that assesses all potential risks and their probability. It’s a section that answers, “What could go wrong and how likely is it?” The risk assessment section of the plan generally includes a system for scoring risk, and sometimes, associated impact. In other cases, ramifications are explored in a related section, the business impact analysis (BIA).

The two core metrics used to express recovery goals and quantify how much disruption an organization can tolerate are recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). 

RTO defines the maximum acceptable time a system or process can be offline after a disruption before the downtime causes unacceptable harm. It answers the question, “How quickly must we be back up?” and informs investments in failover infrastructure, standby systems and recovery automation that enable an organization to meet this target.

RPO defines the maximum acceptable data loss, measured as a span of time. It answers “How much data can we afford to lose?” and informs backup frequency and replication strategy.

These objectives are often derived from a business impact analysis. A BIA assesses how a disruption to critical business functions would affect the organization over time, independent of cause, and translates it into recovery requirements. It examines impact on aspects like daily operations, communication channels and worker safety.

Examples of potential considerations for a BIA include loss of revenue, cost of downtime, cost of reputational repair (public relations), loss of customers and investors (short and long term) and any incurred penalties from violated compliance requirements.

In the context of disaster recovery plans, an asset inventory is a complete and up-to-date accounting of the IT tools and services an organization relies on. Common inclusions are physical hardware such as servers, cloud computing service accounts, software licenses and more.

The inventory becomes a recovery tool when it’s tied to the criticality ratings the BIA produces. Rather than assessing each asset in isolation, an organization maps the importance of its critical business functions onto the systems that support them, so each asset inherits the priority of the functions that depend on it.

For example, say that an e-commerce company maintains two servers. Server 1 keeps the site and payment processing available to customers; server 2 holds internal archives and payroll systems. Tracing the BIA’s findings to these servers shows that server 1 must be restored as fast as possible—within minutes if possible—while server 2 can be recovered within hours or days. This lets engineers prioritize vital business operations when time and resources are limited.

A strong inventory also records how assets depend on one another, not just how important each one is. Server 1 can’t process a payment if the database or authentication service it relies on is still down. The inventory captures those relationships to establish a recovery order­—what must come back before what—rather than a simple ranked list. Prioritization tells engineers what matters most; dependency mapping tells them what sequence recovery must follow.

DRPs are concerned with maximizing data protection and minimizing downtime of critical assets and systems, so contingency planning in the form of backup and redundancy plans are a vital part of any good DRP. Backups—copies of systems, critical applications, databases or other digital files—can be constructed in several different ways.

A DRP outlines the precise nature of the organization’s backups, including the backup schedule, the physical or cloud locations where the backups are stored and whether the backups are incremental or full copies. These backup systems can also feed a secondary system that is updated regularly or in real-time and kept ready to take over through a process called failover. In a failover, when a power outage, cyberattack or other threat causes the primary system to fail, IT operations shift to the secondary system.

For that secondary system to survive the same disaster, it must be genuinely separated from the primary. It can be hosted in a different cloud region or at a physically separate site, so that whatever takes down one location doesn’t take down both.

Virtualization (more on that below) is what makes standing up a secondary system fast and inexpensive, but it does not provide separation on its own: a virtualized copy running on the same hardware fails alongside the original. The failover process automatically redirects traffic once the primary system is found to have failed, and the DRP documents the accounts and locations for all these systems.

Failback is the process of switching back to the original system after it has been restored. For example, a business might fail over from its primary data center to a secondary site where a redundant system takes over—near-instantly if that standby is kept “hot” (often referred to as a hot site) or after a brief spin-up if it isn’t. If run properly, failover and failback can create a seamless experience, perhaps even invisible to clients or users.

Virtualization is often covered in the backup or recovery infrastructure section of a DRP. Virtual machines (VMs) are representations or emulations of physical computers. In terms of disaster recovery, backup environments and resources can be stored on the same hardware, whether that’s on premises or in the cloud, but operate as if they are running on separate hardware.

Virtualization negates the need to provision and configure a new physical server, enabling organizations to replicate a given machine within minutes, rather than hours. That said, in the case of a hardware failure, VMs can all go down at once, as they’re hosted on the same physical hardware.

In the case of IT disasters, communication among team members, stakeholders and business partners is vital. A lack of communication can create confusion, panic and greater damage. A strong DRP can include methods for teams to communicate even in the case of a full outage, such as a WhatsApp or Slack chat accessible by mobile device. It might also include contact information for key stakeholders, business partners, vendors or clients. 

A DRP is a living, evolving document that needs to change as the business needs and risks change. The DRP itself should dictate a regular cadence for discussions on maintenance, updates and disaster recovery testing to help ensure that it’s perpetually up-to-date. This section might also include documentation expressing how post-crisis reporting should be handled.

DRaaS is a cloud-based, third-party software platform designed to assist with many of the disaster recovery tasks that a DRP covers. An organization might turn to DRaaS as a way to offload some of the cost and expertise of maintaining standby infrastructure to a provider.

A DRaaS provider typically hosts and manages the necessary infrastructure for a recovery, including a secondary failover mechanism, and can even create and manage response plans. What that infrastructure looks like varies by provider and tier. For example, DRaaS can provide hot site capabilities (a fully operational clone of an organization’s digital environment), ready to take over near-instantly.

On the other end of the cost spectrum is a cold site, which is infrastructure-ready space that can take significant time to bring online. And there are warm site options, with systems staged and replicating but not continuously live, that fill the gap in between. Some DRaaS solutions require manual failover initiation, while others automate the process.

A DRaaS does not include the communication protocols or risk analysis that a DRP does, and is not a substitute for a DRP; it’s merely one tool that a DRP might outline, among other guides and information.