How to develop an effective disaster recovery plan

Modern IT environments are fast-moving and complex, making organizations efficient and better connected—but also increasing potential failure points. As a result, infrastructure incidents are both more likely and potentially even more damaging.

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Per the 2025 State of Resilience report, organizations disclose per-outage losses ranging from at least $10,000 to more than $1,000,000. Beyond financial impact, prolonged downtime erodes customer trust and can cause lasting reputational damage.

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Organizations use a disaster recovery plan (DRP) to mitigate the impact of these disruptions, but it has to be carefully designed so it holds up in real-world scenarios. This guide outlines the step-by-step process for developing a DRP that is realistic, tested, and aligned with your organization’s needs and business priorities.

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What is a disaster recovery plan?

A disaster recovery plan is a structured document that explains the procedures, roles and responsibilities, and recovery objectives required to restore IT systems, data, and operations after a disruption. The goal is to minimize downtime and ensure critical services become available quickly following the incident.

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While disasters are often associated with large-scale natural events, many business disruptions also stem from operational risks, such as:

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• Cyber incidents
• Human error
• Infrastructure failures

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A DRP sits within an organization's broader resilience strategy, working alongside business continuity plans (BCPs) and incident response plans (IRPs)—each with a distinct role:

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Do all organizations need a disaster recovery plan?

Most organizations benefit from having a DRP, regardless of size or industry. It’s particularly important in modern IT environments that rely on tightly integrated systems, where even an isolated failure can cascade across operations.
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In interconnected environments, it’s common for routine events, such as misconfigurations, infrastructure failures, or third-party service disruptions, to escalate and lead to widespread downtime if not contained quickly.
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“While regulatory requirements vary by industry, virtually all organizations benefit from having a documented and tested DRP. Beyond compliance requirements (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA), customers and partners increasingly expect proof of resilience. Even early-stage startups should have at least a lightweight DRP aligned to their risk profile.”

Niya Raina, GRC SME | Vanta

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In highly regulated sectors, such as healthcare, finance, and critical infrastructure, a DRP is often mandatory. Most frameworks emphasize the same core elements: risk assessments, defined recovery objectives, documented procedures, and regular testing. However, the level of prescriptiveness varies—examples:

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• HIPAA outlines specific contingency planning requirements
• ISO 27001 focuses on control objectives
• FedRAMP emphasizes rigorous testing and evidence

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A DRP also serves as a trust signal, demonstrating to regulators and other stakeholders that the organization prioritizes operational resilience. During industry-wide incidents, a DRP can offer a competitive advantage if it can restore services faster and more reliably than competitors.

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What should a disaster recovery plan include

Each effective DRP template should include these eight key components:

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1. Defined roles and responsibilities: Clear ownership for activating the DRP, coordinating recovery efforts, and executing recovery tasks
2. Recovery objectives: Documented time to recover and the acceptable data loss during incidents
3. Risk assessment results: A prioritized overview of threats your DRP should address
4. Disaster scenarios and response steps: Key scenarios and predefined actions for each
5. Testing and reporting procedures: Tabletop exercises, data recovery tests, and documented outcomes that validate how the DRP works in practice
6. Communication plan: Communication channels, escalation paths, and notification procedures during incidents
7. Data backup strategies: Backup schedules, restoration procedures, and storage locations
8. Periodic review and update schedules: A process and cadence for reviewing and updating the DRP so it remains current and effective

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6 steps to building a disaster recovery plan

While specifics can vary by the organization’s size, industry, and risk environment, developing a DRP involves six general steps:
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1. Perform risk assessment and business impact analysis (BIA)
2. Establish recovery objectives (RTO/RPO)
3. Create a dedicated team
4. Develop a data backup and storage strategy
5. Establish communication procedures
6. Document and test the plan

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Step 1: Perform risk assessment and business impact analysis

Start with understanding your organization’s risk profile. Conduct a risk assessment to identify internal and external factors, such as cyber attacks and natural disasters, that your plan should address.

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For a more actionable process, use dependency mapping to link systems to business functions. The goal is to map high-risk systems that also impact other business functions. Pair this with an impact scoring matrix to quantify the financial and operational consequences.

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Next, conduct a business impact analysis (BIA) to determine the impact of each disruption. Use your findings to create a framework for classifying risks based on severity, response urgency, regulatory reporting required, and the communication needed for remediation.

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A three-tiered threat model can help prioritize responses:
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1. Tier 1: Critical incidents that threaten the integrity of the organization and disrupt core operations. Activating the DRP is essential in this scenario.
2. Tier 2: Significant incident that impacts a limited number of users, a specific department, or a critical application or system. While it doesn’t fully disrupt operations, it still requires DRP activation.
3. Tier 3: A localized incident with minimal impact on business operations. Doesn’t require the DRP trigger if handled through incident management procedures and IT support.

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Tip: A leading GRC solution like Vanta supports DRP not only via regulation-aligned DRP templates—it also helps with risk management and threat modeling through risk registers, real-time alerts, and continuous monitoring, making it easier to track and respond.
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Step 2: Establish recovery objectives (RTO/RPO)

Next, you should determine recovery objectives to guide your disruption response mechanisms. The metrics determine how quickly systems must be restored during an incident and how much data loss is acceptable. 

Two key metrics are central to this step:
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1. Recovery time objective (RTO): The maximum allowable downtime for a function or system
2. Recovery point objective (RPO): The maximum acceptable data loss, measured from the last backup

Your BIA directly informs these targets by quantifying data such as revenue loss per hour of downtime, customer impact thresholds, regulatory reporting timelines, and contractual SLAs. Systems with higher business impact require tighter recovery objectives.

For example, a payment processing system may require a 1-hour RTO with near zero RPO, while an internal knowledge base might tolerate a 24-hour RTO with several hours of data loss.
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“Realistic RTO and RPO targets should be driven by business impact, not technical preference. Systems can be tiered by business impact and criticality, so that high-impact services have tighter RTO/RPO targets. In complex cloud environments, dependency mapping is critical to avoid setting unrealistic recovery expectations.”

Niya Raina, GRC SME | Vanta

Besides RTO and RPO, you can also rank systems/functions using criteria such as regulatory, operational, and financial impact. This keeps your recovery efforts focused on the areas most critical to the business, supporting faster risk-informed decision-making during incidents.

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Step 3: Create a dedicated team

When assigning clear roles and responsibilities to stakeholders, ensure each step of the recovery process has a designated owner for executing the underlying procedures.

Assign alternate stakeholders to specific roles so there’s a better chance that at least one owner will be available for response tasks. Some key roles to cover include:

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To strengthen your plan, consider cross-training team members to reduce the DRP’s dependency on select individuals. 
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A clean way to maintain a tight overview of accountability and recovery tasks is through a centralized dashboard. For instance, Vanta’s live dashboard can help by mapping recovery tasks to individuals and providing visibility into the progress.
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Step 4: Develop a data backup and storage strategy

The next step is to establish clear data backup and storage procedures to restore critical information in the event of a data loss. Define how data is copied, stored, and restored following a disruption, aligned with your organization’s RPO.
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You need to determine:
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• Backup locations: Where you store backed-up data (physical locations or cloud)
• Backup schedule: How often you’ll conduct incremental and full backups
• Backup procedures: What steps to take for a full system backup following recovery from an incident

Your backup data should also be encrypted and protected from unauthorized access, especially if you handle sensitive information. Regularly test data integrity to check if stored data can be restored when necessary.

Another effective way to approach backups is the 3–2–1 strategy. Create three copies of your data, store them on two different storage devices, and keep one copy off-site. That way, you minimize the risk of data loss even during a local disaster or a site-specific adverse event.

Step 5: Establish communication procedures

Effective communication is key to timely disaster recovery and avoiding confusion and inconsistent reporting during critical moments.

Create clear communication protocols led by your assigned communications lead, covering:
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• Timelines and channels to be used for internal notifications
• Steps for informing internal teams
• External communications procedures and channels

To speed up your responses, create pre-drafted, clear communication templates for specific incident scenarios. Your DRP should also include support for post-incident communication. Determine how you’ll update the relevant stakeholders, summarize the incident’s impact, and outline the remediation steps you’ve taken after the incident has been resolved.
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Step 6: Document and test the plan

Treat your DRP as a living document and test it regularly. The DRP director or an equivalent stakeholder must conduct tabletop exercises at least annually to confirm that teams are aware of their responsibilities following disruptions and that operational procedures remain relevant.

DRP testing should include activities such as:

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• Validation testing for data recovery
• Testing if business operations return to normal after recovery
• Confirming RTOs and RPOs

If necessary for regulatory compliance, document the testing and its results so that you maintain a clear audit trail. Your findings can feed into post-incident reviews, highlighting what worked well and what can be optimized.

Vanta offers version-controlled policies with built-in approval mechanisms that can help you iterate and maintain live documents with better visibility.

DRP blind spots to watch out for

Even with a structured approach, DRP design and maintenance can leave gaps you should look out for, including:
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• Missed interdependencies: Modern IT environments rely on coupled systems. Recovering a single application may not restore your systems due to other upstream or downstream dependencies.
• Weak or outdated assumptions: The assumptions you’ve based your DRP on can become weak or dated as your risk environment changes. Regularly rest and validate your risk landscape to keep your DRP up to date.
• No prior drills: Documenting your plan isn’t enough. Without regular tabletop exercises and validation of backup procedures, you risk discovering gaps in your DRP when a real incident happens, increasing its impact.
• Human gaps: Incidents can occur outside working hours or when designated owners aren’t available, which can delay responses. Defining roles, designating alternates, and cross-training reduce this risk.
• Regulation-specific alignments: Depending on your size, industry, and relevant regulation, you may have to align your plans to specific compliance requirements. While you may meet the core criteria, each standard can vary in how prescriptive it is about testing, documentation, and objectives—which requires careful adjustments.

Tighten your DRP and risk management practices with Vanta

Vanta is the #1 agentic trust management platform that helps organizations modernize and maintain every aspect of their GRC and security program, including disaster recovery and incident management. It achieves this through real-time monitoring, built-in risk management workflows, and unified dashboard visibility, speeding up both incident detection and response.

Vanta also offers dedicated, regulation-aligned templates to help you develop effective, audit-ready policies. You can download the disaster recovery plan template to draft a plan that scales with your business and is easy to update.

The Vanta GRC product also comes with numerous helpful features, such as:
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• Automated evidence collection powered by 400+ integrations
• Continuous control monitoring with automated alerts
• On-demand, customizable reports
• Risk visibility and vulnerability management 
• Built-in customizable support for 35+ relevant frameworks and regulations
• Control cross-mapping for multi-framework alignment

Request a demo to see how Vanta can upgrade your GRC program and reduce inefficiencies.