Most DR plans are written to satisfy an auditor and are unusable in an actual disaster: too long, structured by system rather than by sequence, and assuming the authors are available. This one is ordered the way the event unfolds.
Define what triggers invocation. The most common DR failure is nobody declaring a disaster. Write criteria specific enough that an on-call engineer at 03:00 can apply them, and name who is authorised, with a deputy and a timeout if they cannot be reached.
Order the plan by recovery sequence. Structure it the way you will execute: shared services first, then systems in dependency order. A plan organised alphabetically by system forces the reader to compute the sequence while under pressure.
Write role cards, not a contact list. Each role needs its responsibilities, its first three actions, and a deputy. Assume the primary is on a plane. Roles survive staff changes in a way that named individuals do not.
Keep a copy that survives the disaster. A DR plan stored only on the file server you are recovering is not a plan. Printed copies, an offline copy, and a copy on a device outside the affected environment. The access credentials needed must be in the same place.
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A BIA exists to decide the order you recover things in when you cannot recover everything at once. That makes the useful output a ranked list, not a document, and ranking requires scoring impact at several time horizons, because impact is rarely linear.
RTO and RPO are usually set by asking the business what it wants, which reliably returns 'zero'. This worksheet sets them the other way round: measure what you can currently deliver, price the gap, and let the business choose knowingly.
Ransomware recovery differs from ordinary disaster recovery in one decisive way: the environment you restore into may still be compromised. This playbook sequences containment and credential reset before restoration, so you do not recover twice.
Declaration criteria and authority, role cards with deputies and first actions, a dependency-ordered recovery sequence with verification steps, communications for staff and customers, vendor escalation details, and offline copies of the plan and credentials.
A DR plan covers restoring technology: systems, data, infrastructure. A business continuity plan covers how the business keeps operating meanwhile, including manual workarounds, alternative premises, and staffing. You need both; DR alone assumes the business pauses.
A tabletop walkthrough at least annually, and a technical test of the recovery sequence for Tier 1 systems annually too. Also review it after any significant infrastructure change, because recovery sequences go stale faster than the documents describing them.
