Basic Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Standard Operating Procedure: Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan

1. Executive Summary & Purpose

The purpose of this document is to establish a standardized framework for restoring critical business operations following a catastrophic failure of information systems. This SOP ensures a methodical return to operational capacity, minimizing Data Loss (RPO) and Downtime (RTO).

2. Scope & Prerequisites

• Scope: Applies to all infrastructure, data, and applications hosted within the Template Registry production environment.
• Prerequisites:
  • Off-site encrypted backups (immutable).
  • Verified Disaster Recovery Site (Cold/Warm/Hot).
  • Out-of-band communication channel (e.g., Signal, Slack Enterprise Grid).
• Required Tools: Terraform (IaC), AWS/Azure/GCP Console, Password Vault (Bitwarden/1Password), System Documentation repository.

3. Roles & Responsibilities (RACI)

4. Step-by-Step Procedure

Phase I: Declaration & Initial Assessment

• Verify severity of incident (Level 1-3).
• Activate Incident Response Team (IRT) via established communication channel.
• Conduct impact assessment: Define affected services and data integrity state.

Phase II: Infrastructure Restoration

• Provision core networking (VPC, DNS, Load Balancers) via IaC pipelines.
• Validate environment connectivity (Latency and Auth checks).
• Restore Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls.

Phase III: Data Recovery

• Verify integrity of the latest immutable backup (Hash/Checksum validation).
• Initiate database restoration to the primary cluster.
• Perform smoke tests on data consistency.

Phase IV: Application Deployment & Cutover

• Deploy containerized application tiers.
• Execute automated smoke tests (Postman/New Relic).
• Update DNS records to redirect traffic to the recovered environment.

5. Quality Assurance & Pro-Tips

• RPO/RTO Metrics:
  • RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Max 1 hour of data loss.
  • RTO (Recovery Time Objective): Max 4 hours to operational status.
• Pro-Tips:
  • The "IaC First" Rule: Never manually configure DR infrastructure. If it isn't in Terraform/Pulumi, it doesn't exist.
  • Drill Frequency: Perform a "Game Day" exercise every 6 months to expose stale documentation.
  • Pitfall: Ignoring "split-brain" scenarios during DNS cutover. Always verify database primary/secondary roles before public switch.

6. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: How do we determine when to initiate a full DR failover? A: Initiate failover only when the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) for the existing production environment exceeds 4 hours or when data corruption is confirmed beyond local recovery.

Q: What if the password vault is inaccessible during a failure? A: Maintain a physical "Break-Glass" envelope in an off-site safe containing root credentials, rotating every 90 days.

Document Status: Authorized for Distribution Prepared by: Julian Vance, Chief Architect, Template Registry