How to Build a Disaster Recovery Plan
A DR plan is a documented procedure for restoring IT systems after a disaster: hardware failure, cyber attack, fire, flood, or extended outage. It includes recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives, and step-by-step procedures.
A disaster recovery (DR) plan is a documented set of procedures for restoring your IT systems after a disruptive event, hardware failure, cyber attack, fire, flood, or prolonged utility outage. It defines exactly who does what, in what order, to get the business back to operation within defined time limits. Without a tested DR plan, recovery from a serious incident depends on improvisation, which rarely goes well under pressure.
Backup and disaster recovery are related but distinct:
You need both. Backups without a DR plan leave you with data that nobody has a tested procedure to restore into a working environment. DR plans without good backups have nothing to restore from.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How quickly the business must be back to operation after an incident. "We must have email back within 4 hours" is an RTO.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How much data loss is acceptable. "We can lose up to 1 hour of transactions" is an RPO.
These two numbers drive every decision in DR design, backup frequency, replication topology, failover architecture, and budget. You cannot design a DR plan without first agreeing on RTO and RPO with business stakeholders.
On-premises DR typically involves failing over to a secondary physical site, spinning up virtual machines from backup, or recovering from tape/cloud backup into replacement hardware. RTO is measured in hours to days.
Cloud DR can use active-active or active-passive architectures with much lower RTO. Azure Site Recovery, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, and similar services can fail over virtual machines within minutes. The cost is higher, but businesses with sub-hour RTO requirements often cannot achieve them any other way.
Most Northern BC SMBs run a hybrid approach: on-premises servers for day-to-day performance, cloud replication for DR, with RTOs of 4 - 24 hours depending on system criticality.
At minimum:
A DR plan that has not been tested is an assumption document. An untested plan has never found its own errors. Real incidents find them for you.
What is the difference between a DR plan and a BCP? A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) covers how the entire business operates during a disruption, including staff, facilities, and processes. A DR plan is specifically about IT systems recovery. DR is usually a component of a broader BCP.
What is a runbook? A runbook is a step-by-step procedure document for a specific recovery task, for example, "restore the accounting server from cloud backup." Good runbooks are detailed enough that a technically competent person who has never touched your systems can follow them.
How do I calculate my RTO and RPO? Ask the business: "How many hours without this system before revenue or compliance is affected?" and "How much data can we recreate manually if we lost the last X hours?" The honest answers to those questions set your targets.
Do I need DR if I am fully in the cloud? Yes. Cloud platforms fail. Misconfigured cloud environments can be destroyed by ransomware. Cloud-to-cloud DR (replication between regions or providers) is the equivalent.
Can North Star IT build a DR plan for us? Yes. North Star builds, tests, and maintains disaster recovery plans for businesses across Northern BC, Alberta, and Yukon, including cloud DR infrastructure and annual drill facilitation.
Does your business have a tested DR plan? Call 672-983-1174 or book a free DR readiness review at northstarit.ca.
Quick answers.
What is a disaster recovery plan?
A DR plan is a documented procedure for restoring IT systems after a disaster: hardware failure, cyber attack, fire, flood, or extended outage. It includes recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives, and step-by-step procedures.
How is DR different from backup?
Backup protects the data. DR is the plan to get the business running again. You need both. Backups without DR are data nobody can use.
How often should we test DR?
At least once a year for major scenarios. North Star tests restores quarterly and runs a full DR drill annually for clients with formal plans.
How much does a DR plan cost?
Building a basic DR plan for a small business runs 2,000 to 8,000 dollars one time, plus ongoing testing. Larger or regulated organizations spend more.
Can Northstar IT build a DR plan for us?
Yes. North Star builds, tests, and maintains disaster recovery plans for Canadian SMBs.
Have a specific situation in mind?
Book a free 30-minute scoping call with a Northstar IT engineer. We will walk through your environment, your questions, and what good looks like for your team.
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