It Dr Runbook Template

Standard Operating Procedure: IT Disaster Recovery (DR) Execution

1. Document Control Block

2. Executive Summary & Scope

This document delineates the standardized technical protocol for the activation and execution of IT Disaster Recovery operations. The scope encompasses all Tier-0 and Tier-1 mission-critical assets hosted within the Template Registry primary data center and cloud environments. This SOP is engineered to align with ISO/IEC 27031 standards, ensuring business continuity (BCP) and regulatory compliance regarding data integrity and availability.

3. Prerequisites & Tool Requirements

• Access Protocols: Validated multi-factor authentication (MFA) to the Out-of-Band (OOB) management network.
• Software/Infrastructure: Access to the Immutable DR Vault, IaC (Infrastructure as Code) repositories (Terraform/Ansible), and the StatusPage communication bridge.
• Certifications: DR responders must maintain current Incident Command System (ICS) 100/200 certifications.
• Hardware: Encrypted hardware security module (HSM) tokens for root key recovery.

4. Roles & Responsibilities (RACI Matrix)

5. Step-by-Step Operational Procedure

Phase I: Validation & Triage

• Verify incident severity against predefined DR trigger criteria.
• Declare formal DR status via the internal communication channel.
• Isolate compromised segments to prevent cross-environment propagation.

Phase II: Environment Instantiation

• Execute Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) deployment scripts for the recovery region.
• Verify connectivity to the Immutable Backup Vault.
• Perform integrity checksums on mission-critical database snapshots.

Phase III: Data Restoration & Sync

• Restore Tier-0 Identity Providers (Active Directory/LDAP/OIDC).
• Mount database volumes and execute point-in-time recovery (PITR).
• Verify application-level consistency markers against known state.

Phase IV: Cutover & Verification

• Update DNS/Load Balancer pointers to route traffic to the DR region.
• Execute smoke tests for core functionality via the QA synthetic monitoring suite.
• Re-establish replication tunnels to maintain data consistency during the outage.

6. Quality Assurance & Verification Criteria

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Total system availability must be achieved within < 4 hours.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Data loss threshold must not exceed 15 minutes of transactional drift.
• Verification Audit: Post-restoration, a security scan is mandatory to confirm no persistence of the original threat vector.
• Acceptance Benchmark: All health-check probes must return HTTP 200 status for 15 consecutive minutes.

7. Practical Troubleshooting Scenarios

Scenario A: IaC Deployment Failure

• Detection: Terraform state locking errors or module dependency timeout.
• Corrective Action: Immediate switch to "Break-Glass" manual provisioning of essential VMs (Templates: GOLD_IMG_V4). Bypass failed automated modules and log state for post-mortem analysis.

Scenario B: Data Corruption during PITR

• Detection: Integrity check failure on primary SQL volume.
• Corrective Action: Pivot to the "Golden Snapshot" (T-minus 24 hours). Execute transaction log replay from the secondary sync-site to bridge the gap. Document deviation from standard RPO.

Scenario C: DNS Propagation Delay

• Detection: Traffic failing to route to the DR IP endpoints after switchover.
• Corrective Action: Force TTL flush on internal DNS recursive resolvers and execute direct point-to-IP traffic shaping via perimeter firewalls.

Approved by: Julian Vance Chief Operations Architect, Template Registry