What is a disaster recovery plan?

A disaster recovery plan is fundamentally a documented strategy specifically designed for restoring systems and data after a disruption, such as a natural disaster, cyberattack, or any significant incident that affects an organization's operations. This plan outlines the processes and procedures necessary to recover and protect the organization's IT infrastructure, ensuring minimal downtime and data loss.

Implementing an effective disaster recovery plan is crucial for maintaining business continuity, as it provides a structured approach to recovering critical systems and data to ensure that the organization can resume normal operations as quickly as possible. This includes identifying key applications and data, establishing recovery time objectives (RTO), and clearly defining responsibilities and actions for recovery operations.

Other options, while they touch on important aspects of organizational resilience, do not align as closely with the definition of a disaster recovery plan. Financial recovery strategies are part of business continuity but do not focus specifically on IT systems and data recovery. Managing public relations is essential for maintaining an organization's reputation after an incident, but it does not address the technical restoration of systems and data. Lastly, preemptive risk assessments are vital for identifying vulnerabilities before incidents occur, but they do not encompass the recovery phase after a disruption has happened.