Disaster Recovery Plan Template ISO 27001

Standard Operating Procedure: Disaster Recovery Plan (ISO 27001 Annex A.17)

1. Executive Summary & Purpose

This document establishes the institutional framework for maintaining business continuity and information security resilience in alignment with ISO/IEC 27001:2022 (Control 5.30). The purpose is to define systematic processes for responding to disruptive incidents, ensuring the restoration of critical information assets within defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).

2. Scope & Prerequisites

• Scope: All Information Technology infrastructure, data repositories, cloud-native environments, and third-party SaaS integrations under Template Registry governance.
• Required Tools: Immutable off-site backups, hardened recovery environment (Air-gapped), Incident Response Management platform (e.g., PagerDuty/Jira Service Management), and redundant communication channels (e.g., Signal/Out-of-band).
• Prerequisites: Validated system backups (verified within 24 hours), current configuration baselines (IaC manifests), and an up-to-date staff contact registry.

3. Roles & Responsibilities (RACI)

4. Step-by-Step Procedure

Phase I: Detection and Triage

• Declare incident status based on established trigger criteria.
• Establish "War Room" (Virtual/Physical) and secure out-of-band communications.
• Verify impact scope: Identify which business-critical services are degraded.

Phase II: Activation and Mobilization

• Notify stakeholders and initiate the DR team roster.
• Halt non-essential deployments and lock down production environment access.
• Transition traffic to standby infrastructure (if applicable).

Phase III: Recovery and Restoration

• Provision clean environment (Infrastructure as Code deployment).
• Restore data from verified immutable backups (RPO validation).
• Perform integrity checks and security hardening (Patch validation).
• Initiate service verification tests against production baselines.

Phase IV: Normalization and Post-Mortem

• Execute controlled switchback to primary data center.
• Conduct Post-Incident Review (PIR) within 72 hours.
• Update DRP documentation based on lessons learned during the recovery cycle.

5. Quality Assurance & Pro-Tips

• Metric Thresholds:
  • RTO: Must meet < 4 hours for Tier-1 applications.
  • RPO: Data loss tolerance is < 15 minutes.
• Pro-Tip (Infrastructure as Code): Never restore "state" manually. Treat your recovery as an automated deployment exercise using your existing CI/CD pipelines to ensure consistent state.
• Common Pitfall: Failing to test the "fail-back" process. A recovery plan that cannot return to normal operations is fundamentally incomplete.
• Audit Readiness: Store all communication logs and recovery timestamps in an immutable WORM (Write Once, Read Many) drive to satisfy ISO auditors during your annual surveillance.

6. Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How often should we test the DR plan to remain compliant? A: ISO 27001 requires periodic testing. At Template Registry, we mandate a full-scale simulation every 12 months and table-top exercises quarterly.

Q: What defines a "successful" recovery during a simulation? A: A recovery is successful if 100% of the RTO and RPO metrics are met, and the security configuration of the restored environment passes an automated vulnerability scan (e.g., Nessus/Qualys) prior to traffic cut-over.

Approved by: Julian Vance Chief Architect, Template Registry