What Are the Steps in a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Outages are expensive, and the bill has not shrunk just because incidents have grown less frequent.

Individual sites are getting better at avoiding outages, yet the cost of a serious failure has not followed. According to Uptime Institute’s 2026 analysis, 57% of organizations said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000, and roughly one in five put it above $1 million.

IBM’s research found that most breached organizations needed more than 100 days to reach broader organizational recovery, meaning the whole business returned to normal, not a single workload’s recovery time. The effects reach far when no tested plan exists.

The sequence below runs in order, and that order matters as much as the content. Each step feeds the next, so skipping ahead tends to create gaps you only notice during a real incident.

1. Define the Scope, Objectives, and Recovery Team

Start by deciding what the plan covers: sites, data centers, cloud, customer-facing applications, identity and security services, SaaS tools, and key vendors. Name a disaster recovery coordinator who can make decisions during an incident and secure management approval. 

List the core recovery roles and alternates, since the person you expect to lead might be unreachable when something breaks. Separate the disaster recovery team (technology) from the broader business continuity team (people and facilities).

2. Conduct a Risk Assessment

Next, look at what could go wrong. A risk assessment identifies disruptive events and weighs each by likelihood, impact, and vulnerability. It is tempting to picture only natural disasters, but the common threats are quieter, such as ransomware, a misconfiguration, hardware failure, a regional cloud outage, a compromised admin account, or corrupted backups. 

A risk assessment is not a business impact analysis. Rather, it asks what could happen and how likely, while the impact analysis asks what it costs when a system is down.

3. Perform a Business Impact Analysis

A business impact analysis identifies your most critical functions and the cost of losing them. The valuable part is connecting business processes to the technology underneath, since one checkout flow might depend on a database, an identity service, and a payment API at once. 

The output should be concrete: tiered functions, a prioritized inventory of applications and data, a maximum tolerable outage for each, and proposed RTO and RPO targets. Tiering matters because priorities differ, because if you lose checkout, sales drop by the minute, while losing an archive for a day goes unnoticed.

4. Set RTO and RPO Targets

With priorities ranked, attach numbers to them. RTO, the recovery time objective, is the maximum downtime you can accept for a workload. RPO, the recovery point objective, is the maximum data loss you can accept, measured as a span of time. 

Set these per workload, not one blanket target. Zero downtime and zero data loss everywhere is costly, so stakeholders need realistic targets. The two numbers drive different decisions: RPO shapes how often you back up or replicate, while RTO shapes the architecture you build and how fast failover must be.

5. Choose a Recovery Strategy

Once each workload has targets, match it to a recovery method on a scale. Backup and restore is the slowest and cheapest. A pilot light keeps a minimal core running, a warm standby holds a scaled-down copy ready to grow, a hot standby keeps a near-complete environment waiting, and active-active runs two live environments at once. 

Higher up the scale, recovery gets faster but costs more, so it must earn its price against the RTO it protects. Infrastructure-as-code helps rebuild environments consistently for clean-room recovery after ransomware.

6. Build a Secure Backup Plan

Backups alone are not disaster recovery. A solid backup plan specifies what gets backed up, how often (aligned to each workload’s RPO), retention, encryption, and who can access the copies. 

Immutable or offline copies also matter because ransomware that reaches your backups can wipe out your recovery option, along with everything else. However, a finished backup is not a recoverable one. Restore time counts against your RTO, so test restores in a non-production environment and find problems before an incident, not during one.

7. Document Failover and Failback Procedures

A strategy only helps if someone can run it under pressure, so convert it into executable runbooks. Failover is the shift to a healthy secondary environment when the primary fails. Failback is the return to the primary once it is stable, and it tends to be harder, since it means reversing replication, validating, and reconciling data that changed on the secondary. 

A good runbook spells out the activation triggers, recovery order, restoration, validation checks, and who gets notified. Plan failback from the start, since teams that design only for failover often improvise the trip home.

8. Assign Roles and Communication Procedures

Recovery is not only technical, but also involves document escalation and communications alongside the hands-on work. That means internal, vendor, and customer contacts, executive reporting, any legal or regulatory notifications you owe, preapproved message templates, and contact information reachable when your main systems are down. 

A RACI matrix makes responsibility unambiguous, so no one is guessing who declares a disaster, restores backups, approves customer messaging, or signs off that recovery is complete.

9. Test, Train, and Update the Plan

Finally, prove it works. Testing shows the plan recovers systems within their RTO and RPO. A sensible approach climbs a ladder of realistic tests: 

• Documentation review
• Tabletop walkthrough
• Backup restore
• Component test
• Simulation or parallel run
• Full failover

Measure data integrity, the actual RTO and RPO you hit, and whether the full stack functions. A plan also goes stale, so update it after new applications, migrations, personnel or vendor changes, failed tests, or real incidents, and close every exercise with an after-action review.

What is the difference between a disaster recovery plan and a business continuity plan?

A disaster recovery plan restores technology, including applications, infrastructure, and data. A business continuity plan is broader, covering people, facilities, suppliers, communications, and the manual workarounds that keep a business running while systems are down. The cleanest way to picture it is that disaster recovery is a core part of business continuity. You can recover your servers and still be unable to operate if nothing accounts for the rest.

How often should you test a disaster recovery plan?

There is no single schedule that fits everyone. A better approach is risk-based: Test mission-critical systems more often, and run a test whenever something material changes, such as a migration, a new application, or a personnel change. The point is to keep the plan honest as systems change, since one that matched last year’s setup can quietly fail against this year’

A finished disaster recovery plan is a strong start, but a document is only the beginning, and real confidence comes from demonstrating recovery. At OTAVA, our managed DRaaS, powered by Zerto, VMware, and Veeam, aligns measurable RTO and RPO targets with validated runbooks, scenario-based testing, and restore validation, plus compliance across HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and ISO 27001. If you want help proving your plan under pressure, contact OTAVA, and we will help you build and maintain a tested disaster recovery plan.