Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery (DR) is the set of policies, tools, and procedures for recovering technology infrastructure and systems after a significant disruption. While business continuity focuses on keeping operations going, disaster recovery focuses specifically on restoring IT systems — servers, networks, data, and applications — to their normal operating state.

Key elements of disaster recovery include regular data backups, backup testing (proving you can actually restore from backups), recovery time objectives (how fast you need systems back), and recovery point objectives (how much data loss is acceptable). Your DR plan should be tested regularly through tabletop exercises and actual recovery drills.