Disaster Recovery Program Playbook
A phased disaster recovery program: business impact analysis with RTO/RPO targets, a proportional DR architecture, automated runbooks, and continuous drills that prove recovery works.
Disaster Recovery Program Playbook
Disaster recovery is the discipline of restoring critical systems after a major failure: regional outage, data corruption, or ransomware. A DR plan that has never been tested is a liability, not an asset. This program designs DR against measurable targets and proves it works through regular drills.
Phase-by-Phase
Business Impact Analysis. Work with the business to classify systems into criticality tiers, then set recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for each tier. Map dependencies so recovery order is known. These targets are the foundation of every later decision.
DR Architecture. Choose a strategy proportional to the targets: backup-and-restore for tolerant systems, pilot light or warm standby for moderate RTO, and hot standby for near-zero RTO. Implement immutable, tested backups, and provision the recovery site as code so it is reproducible.
Runbooks and Automation. Write clear recovery runbooks, automate failover so recovery does not depend on tribal knowledge, and secure the recovery path so an attacker cannot disable it. Protect backups from ransomware with immutability and isolation.
Test and Maintain. Run DR drills on a schedule, validate that real RTO and RPO meet targets, and review the plan regularly because configuration drift quietly invalidates it.
Team and Roles
An architect owns the DR strategy. SRE owns drills and failover automation. DevOps provisions recovery infrastructure. DBAs own data backup and restore. Security protects the recovery path and backup integrity.
Risks and Mitigations
Untested recovery is the most common cause of DR failure; drills are mandatory. Backup corruption is mitigated with integrity checks and restore tests. Ransomware propagation to backups is mitigated with immutable, isolated copies. Configuration drift is caught by reproducing the recovery site from code.
Success Criteria
Drills consistently meet RTO and RPO, drills succeed reliably, and backups are provably recoverable.
Tooling
Terraform provisions the recovery site reproducibly, S3 with object lock holds immutable backups, Kubernetes restores workloads, Datadog monitors the DR posture, and Vault secures recovery credentials.