An IT disaster recovery plan explains how to restore essential operations after a major outage. Start with a practical question. If your systems went down tomorrow morning, what would you need back to fill orders, help customers and pay staff?
Set targets for downtime and data loss
For each critical activity, document your recovery time objective (RTO), the target for how quickly it should resume, and your recovery point objective (RPO), how much recent work you can afford to lose measured in time. A four-hour recovery target and a one-hour data loss limit for order processing may require a different setup from an application people use once a week.
Restore services in dependency order
List what each service needs before it can run. Invoicing might depend on network access, an identity service and a database. Name who activates the plan, contacts suppliers and checks that work can resume. Keep contact details and essential steps somewhere staff can reach during an email or network outage.
Run a realistic exercise
Imagine the order system is down at opening time. Ask staff to reach the right people, find the instructions and verify a restore in a separate environment. Have a user run a test order once the service is back. Record the gap between your targets and the outcome, assign fixes and set a date to test again.
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