Bcp and Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Standard Operating Procedure: Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BCDR)

1. Executive Summary & Purpose

This document provides the mandatory framework for maintaining business operations during unforeseen service interruptions. The purpose is to define the recovery objectives (RTO/RPO), identify critical assets, and establish the communication protocols required to restore Template Registry infrastructure to a "Known Good State" with minimal latency.

2. Scope & Prerequisites

• Scope: Applies to all cloud-hosted infrastructure, data storage nodes, and application services managed by the Template Registry engineering team.
• Required Tools: Access to the Terraform Cloud state, AWS/GCP management console, PagerDuty, and encrypted offline backup repositories.
• Software Prerequisites: Current Terraform provider versions, verified backup integrity logs, and updated emergency contact directory (stored in cold storage).
• Safety/PPE: N/A (Digital environment).

3. Roles & Responsibilities (RACI)

4. Step-by-Step Procedure

Phase I: Triage & Declaration

• Verify severity (Level 1: Minor; Level 3: Catastrophic).
• Invoke Incident Command center (Slack war-room or encrypted channel).
• Notify internal stakeholders based on the RACI matrix.

Phase II: Assessment & Isolation

• Isolate compromised segments to prevent lateral movement.
• Capture current state logs (snapshots) for forensics.
• Determine the RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Identify the last verified backup timestamp.

Phase III: Recovery & Restoration

• Initialize Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) deployment to a clean environment.
• Restore database from the most recent immutable snapshot.
• Run automated health checks to verify service availability.
• Re-route traffic via DNS/Load Balancer once latency thresholds are met.

Phase IV: Post-Mortem & Reporting

• Archive all incident logs and communication threads.
• Conduct Blame-Free Post-Mortem within 72 hours.
• Update BCDR documentation based on lessons learned.

5. Quality Assurance & Pro-Tips

• Metric Thresholds:
  • RTO (Recovery Time Objective): < 4 hours.
  • RPO (Recovery Point Objective): < 15 minutes.
• Pro-Tips:
  • Immutable Backups: Ensure your primary backups are cross-account/cross-region and WORM (Write Once, Read Many) compliant.
  • Drift Detection: Periodically run terraform plan during "peace time" to ensure your DR infrastructure matches production config.
• Common Pitfalls: Neglecting to update hardcoded secrets in the DR environment. Always use a centralized secret manager (e.g., Vault).

6. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: If my IaC templates are corrupted, how do I restore services? A: Utilize the local "Golden Version" repository stored in the offline cold-storage git mirror. Never rely solely on cloud-hosted repositories during a total platform outage.

Q: When should we declare a disaster rather than an incident? A: Declare a disaster when the estimated time to restore exceeds 4 hours or when data integrity is compromised beyond immediate surgical repair.

Q: How often must we test this procedure? A: Tabletop exercises are required quarterly. A full-scale, isolated environment failover test is mandatory every 6 months.

End of Document. Authorized by Julian Vance, Chief Architect.