How to write an IT Disaster Recovery plan

Build your own IT DR plan.

IT DR planning anticipates technology downtime and creates contingencies and workarounds that mitigate against its potential consequences.

Much like business continuity, IT DR poses simple questions that produce complex answers. Every business, no matter what they do, starts out with the same two key questions:

1. What are our core business activities?
2. What IT systems do we need to carry out those activities?

These questions identify critical IT systems. From there, the business must ask itself:

3. How long can we survive without them?
4. What steps must we take to recover them, and how long will that take?

Following the well-defined structure of business continuity planning can be a very effective way to understand and create robust and well-tailored IT Disaster Recovery plans.