IT Disaster Recovery FAQs

Disaster recovery (DR) focuses on IT infrastructure and data recovery, whereas business continuity (BC) encompasses a broader scope, ensuring the continuation of all essential business functions beyond just IT systems. Both are crucial parts of a comprehensive approach to managing risk and maintaining operations in the face of disruptions.

Your runbook should begin by clearly explaining its purpose and scope. It should spell out everyone’s roles and responsibilities and the details of every system, including criticality, dependencies, and recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) targets. Core technologies and personnel crucial to recovery need to be listed. This includes access methods, backup information, and any qualifying credentials. Your recovery procedures need to be included, of course, along with failover and failback instructions as well as your communication protocol. A well-organized appendix can help users access contacts, visualizations, and resources. 

Choose the right test for your objectives — a tabletop exercise, a data simulation, a full interruption test, or a parallel test (which lets you avoid disruption). Make detailed plans and communicate them to key stakeholders if appropriate. You’ll need to identify and include all the right people to represent each critical department in your testing and verify that all your communication plans are effective in demonstrating your readiness and the program’s efficacy. Be sure to log every step of your testing so you can review and learn from it — and commit to testing regularly. 

A purpose-built software solution can provide automation that improves the efficiency, accuracy, and optimization in your disaster recovery (DR) testing. Ideally, you want to be alerted to any gaps in your system and get help addressing them. Automation can assist you with regular testing and simulations for any scenario, at scale, as well as facilitate logging any failure or recovery — staged or real. If you don’t opt for a purpose-built platform, you can create scripts, monitoring tools, and orchestration tools to achieve the benefits of automation.

Auditors want to see proof of your readiness, so you’ll want to be prepared to share details of your disaster recovery plan, business impact analyses (BIAs), and risk assessments. Your disaster recovery (DR) playbook should be ready to share externally, along with test plans and logs. Be ready to present information about all third parties and service-level agreements (SLAs), as well as your plans for third-party DR. Keep all your documentation of backups and restorations, as well as all your DR policies and proof of up-to-date training.

IT disaster recovery (ITDR) is an overall process of identifying and putting in place the most cost effective and time efficient disaster recovery plans for a business’s IT requirements.

Learn more about IT disaster recovery.

An IT disaster recovery plan is a document that outlines how an IT system will be recovering from an infrastructure/application service disruption.

First, you’ll need to identify and prioritize your business functions through a business impact analysis (BIA) or similar process, including a technology assessment for visibility into critical applications. You’ll need to determine your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) — how much time you can spend restoring systems and how important your data is based on your business’s priorities.

Next, you should audit all your IT assets, understand their interdependencies, figure out what threats you’re facing, and plan your recovery strategies. Finally, your recovery plans need to be documented, tested, and regularly updated. 

A recovery point objective (RPO) measures back in time to when an organization’s data was preserved in a usable format, usually to the most recent backup.

A recovery time objective (RTO) is the duration of time and a service level within which a business process, application, and/or vendor service must be available after a disaster in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in continuity.