Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Standard Operating Procedure: Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) Plan

1. Executive Summary & Purpose

This SOP establishes the institutional framework for data protection, system availability, and service restoration at Template Registry. The purpose is to minimize Data Loss (RPO) and System Downtime (RTO) during catastrophic events, hardware failure, or cyber-attacks.

2. Scope & Prerequisites

• Scope: All production environment assets, including cloud-native infrastructure, on-premises databases, and internal SaaS repositories.
• Prerequisites:
  • Administrative access to primary infrastructure (AWS/Azure/GCP/vCenter).
  • Verified off-site/immutable backup storage buckets.
  • Monitoring software access (Datadog/NewRelic/Prometheus).
  • Out-of-band communication channel (Slack/PagerDuty/Signal).

3. Roles & Responsibilities (RACI Matrix)

4. Step-by-Step Procedure

Phase I: Identification and Declaration

• Verify anomaly or incident report via Monitoring/Incident Response system.
• Assess scope: Localized failure (Single node) vs. Region-wide outage.
• Initiate the "Declare Disaster" protocol if RTO thresholds are exceeded.

Phase II: Backup Verification & Integrity Check

• Validate integrity of the latest immutable snapshot.
• Confirm checksum matches against the production production state pre-incident.
• Ensure BDR network segment is isolated to prevent cross-contamination (if malware suspected).

Phase III: Restoration & Failover

• Provision target infrastructure (IaaC: Terraform/CloudFormation).
• Restore data volumes from the last "Known-Good" backup.
• Execute automated database integrity scripts.
• Perform smoke tests on core API endpoints.

Phase IV: Post-Mortem & Reporting

• Reconcile restored data with transaction logs.
• Compile "Incident Chronology" report.
• Update backup retention policies based on "Lessons Learned."

5. Quality Assurance & Pro-Tips

• Metric Thresholds:
  • RPO (Recovery Point Objective): < 15 Minutes.
  • RTO (Recovery Time Objective): < 2 Hours for Tier-1 services.
• Pro-Tips:
  • Never skip the restore-test phase. A backup is not a backup until you have successfully performed a restoration.
  • Implement Immutable Backups (Object Lock) to mitigate ransomware encryption attacks.
  • Perform a "Game Day" simulation quarterly to ensure the team retains muscle memory.

6. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: What if the backup integrity check fails? A: Immediately fall back to the N-1 (previous) snapshot. Do not attempt to repair corrupted blocks manually in the restoration stream. Notify the Security Team as this may indicate a tampering event.

Q: Are we authorized to perform local failover without CTO approval? A: Only if the failure impacts customer-facing availability. If the incident is limited to internal dev/staging environments, follow standard change management workflows.

Authorized by: Julian Vance, Chief Architect, Template Registry