Certified: The CISM Prepcast

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A disaster recovery plan is one of the most essential tools an organization can maintain in its effort to safeguard critical operations and maintain continuity in the face of disruption. It is specifically designed to address the recovery and restoration of IT systems, infrastructure, and services following a major incident—such as a cyberattack, hardware failure, or natural disaster. Unlike broader continuity planning, the disaster recovery plan, or DRP, zeroes in on the technical environment, detailing how to bring back online the systems that form the operational backbone of the enterprise. It allows organizations to restore data, restart applications, reestablish communications, and recover access to critical information. A well-constructed DRP does more than just guide technical recovery—it aligns IT recovery actions with the business’s overall priorities, ensuring that what is restored first has the greatest value to the organization’s mission. By setting realistic recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives, the DRP provides a concrete, structured pathway to minimize disruption. And for many regulated industries, maintaining and regularly updating a DRP is not only a best practice but a requirement for compliance, audit readiness, and third-party validation.
To understand how the DRP fits into the broader landscape of resilience, it's important to distinguish it from related security documents. The business continuity plan, or BCP, focuses on ensuring that core business functions can continue, even when disruptions render normal operations impossible. The BCP includes facilities, personnel, vendors, and manual processes. The incident response plan, or IRP, focuses on threat detection, analysis, containment, and eradication—essentially responding to and resolving the root causes of disruptive events. In this ecosystem, the DRP fills the role of restoring the systems and data that the business needs to function. These three plans are not meant to stand alone. Rather, they should complement and reinforce one another. For example, if a ransomware attack locks critical systems, the IRP would initiate containment and forensic analysis, the DRP would activate recovery mechanisms to restore systems, and the BCP would keep business operations running through alternate procedures. By aligning objectives, communication flows, and activation protocols, the organization creates a coordinated and layered approach to resilience.
Designing a disaster recovery plan begins with knowing what needs to be recovered. This involves identifying all systems and assets critical to operations, which should be informed by the organization’s most recent business impact analysis. The BIA will indicate which applications and systems support key revenue-generating, compliance-driven, or customer-facing functions. These systems must be classified based on how essential they are to operations, regulatory obligations, or contractual service levels. This includes not just core applications, but also underlying infrastructure like servers, network devices, databases, and even cloud services. Each system must be assigned an owner responsible for ensuring it is properly documented in the DRP. Dependencies must be identified, such as applications that rely on a shared database, authentication service, or internal API. Acceptable downtime should be documented for each system, and recovery priorities should be sequenced according to the established recovery time and recovery point objectives. Without this foundational inventory and prioritization, recovery efforts can quickly become disorganized and misaligned with business needs.
Setting recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives is not simply a technical task—it’s a business-driven decision that balances operational urgency with realistic technical capabilities. A recovery time objective, or RTO, is the maximum allowable time that a system can remain unavailable before its absence causes unacceptable harm. A recovery point objective, or RPO, defines how much data loss is tolerable, typically expressed as a time value representing how far back in time data can be restored from backup or replication sources. For example, a system with a four-hour RTO must be recovered within four hours of the disruption’s onset, and a system with a fifteen-minute RPO must never lose more than fifteen minutes of data. These objectives must be clearly documented, approved by business leadership, and confirmed to be achievable using current infrastructure and tools. They must also be reviewed and updated periodically. As technology evolves, as data becomes more critical, or as systems are replaced or retired, RTOs and RPOs must evolve to reflect new realities.
Choosing the right disaster recovery strategies and supporting technologies involves evaluating not just performance, but also cost, complexity, and scalability. Organizations may choose among a variety of recovery site options. A cold site provides basic infrastructure but no pre-installed systems, resulting in slower recovery but lower cost. A warm site includes partially configured systems and data, enabling quicker startup. A hot site mirrors the production environment in near real time, allowing immediate failover at a higher cost. Recovery may be handled through physical data centers, cloud-based services, or a hybrid approach. Backup and replication technologies must be selected to support the organization’s required RPO values, with consideration for factors such as encryption, data validation, and storage location. Other supporting technologies include load balancing tools to distribute traffic, automated failover to redirect services to alternate systems, and high-availability configurations that reduce the risk of total failure. Each chosen approach must be documented, tested, and justified based on recovery requirements, cost-benefit analysis, and system criticality.
The DRP document itself must be structured for use during crisis conditions—clear, concise, and actionable. It begins with administrative elements: the purpose of the plan, the systems and environments it covers, underlying assumptions, and contact information for key individuals. The bulk of the document consists of step-by-step recovery instructions for each critical system. These instructions must include pre-recovery checks, detailed recovery actions, verification steps, and fallback options. Team roles must be clearly defined, indicating who does what, when, and in what sequence. Escalation paths should be included in case tasks cannot be completed as planned. Coordination with the business continuity team must be documented to ensure that while IT systems are being restored, business units remain informed and supported. Supporting materials—such as infrastructure diagrams, lists of hardware and software assets, vendor contracts, licensing keys, and configuration details—should be attached as appendices or referenced in secured repositories. Every page of the document must be accessible and readable under pressure, which means using plain language, consistent formatting, and up-to-date content.
Assigning the right people to the right roles is a key factor in ensuring that the DRP functions properly during a real event. A disaster recovery coordinator must be named to oversee the activation and progress of the recovery effort. This individual must have authority to make decisions, reallocate resources, and escalate issues. Technical leads should be assigned for each major platform or environment—such as systems, networks, databases, and cloud platforms. Communication liaisons should handle interaction with business leaders, vendors, and external partners. Backup personnel must be identified for every critical role to ensure continuity if someone is unavailable. Up-to-date contact details, including after-hours information and alternate communication methods, should be maintained and validated regularly. On-call schedules and rotation policies must be part of the plan to ensure readiness at all times.
The DRP must be tightly integrated with daily IT operations to remain relevant and usable. This means aligning the DRP with change management processes so that any modification to a production system results in a corresponding update to the recovery plan. Patch management, asset management, and software lifecycle management processes must all feed into DRP maintenance activities. DR readiness should be visible on IT dashboards and included in risk reporting to keep stakeholders informed. As systems change, new dependencies emerge, and technologies evolve, the DRP must reflect those updates to avoid errors and inefficiencies during activation. Cybersecurity must also be woven into the DRP, ensuring that recovery actions maintain system integrity and do not inadvertently restore a compromised state or bypass forensic logging requirements.
Testing is one of the most critical components of any DRP. A plan that exists only on paper has limited value. Testing must be conducted on a regular schedule using a mix of methods. Tabletop exercises involve discussing recovery scenarios in a meeting format, helping teams validate understanding of their roles. Partial failover tests allow organizations to verify that systems can be shifted to backup platforms under controlled conditions. Full simulation tests provide the most realistic validation, restoring full environments to test end-to-end functionality. During each test, teams must assess whether they can meet the documented RTOs and RPOs under practical conditions. Backup restoration must be tested not just for completion, but also for data integrity. Any errors, delays, or misunderstandings uncovered during tests must be recorded, analyzed, and used to improve the plan. These lessons should be reflected in updated documentation, revised procedures, and training materials for future use.
Maintaining the disaster recovery plan is an ongoing effort that requires strong governance and organizational support. The plan must be formally reviewed at least once a year, though more frequent reviews may be needed for highly dynamic environments. Whenever a new system is introduced, a major upgrade occurs, or the organization adopts new services or vendors, the plan must be updated accordingly. Dependencies, contacts, contracts, and escalation procedures must all be verified and revised. Regulatory requirements must be monitored, particularly in industries such as finance, healthcare, and energy, where recovery capabilities are scrutinized closely. The DRP maintenance process should be embedded within broader IT governance frameworks and risk management workflows. This ensures that disaster recovery is not treated as an isolated project but as a core competency of the enterprise.
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