To create a robust IT disaster recovery plan, run a business impact analysis, set recovery time and recovery point objectives, choose backup and failover solutions, document the process, train your response team, and test the plan regularly. A strong plan minimizes downtime, protects critical data, and keeps your business running after a cyberattack, hardware failure, or natural disaster.
Last updated: May 28, 2026
A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a document that outlines how your business will respond to and recover from various types of disasters, such as natural calamities, cyberattacks, power outages, human errors, and more. A DRP is essential for ensuring business continuity, minimizing downtime, protecting data, and complying with regulations. Building one isn’t a simple task. It takes careful planning, analysis, testing, and updating. This guide walks your IT team through the steps, and you can lean on managed IT services if you would rather have engineers handle it for you.
TL;DR
A disaster recovery plan tells your team exactly how to restore IT systems and data after an outage. Start with a business impact analysis, set your RTO and RPO targets, then pick backup and failover solutions that meet them. Document everything, train the people who will run the plan, and test it on a schedule. An untested plan is just a guess, so rehearse it before you ever need it.
Steps to Create an IT Disaster Recovery Plan for SMBs
A disaster recovery plan is the part of your wider business continuity strategy that focuses on technology. It defines how you bring servers, applications, and data back online after a disruption, and how fast. The 6 steps below take you from analysis to a tested, living plan.
Step 1: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
A business impact analysis identifies and evaluates how different disaster scenarios would hit your operations, processes, assets, and stakeholders. It helps you prioritize the most critical functions that need to come back first, and it shows the cost and benefit of each recovery option. A thorough BIA covers the following.
- Define the scope and objectives of the analysis
- Identify the key business functions and processes that support your goals and operations
- Assess the dependencies, risks, and vulnerabilities of each function and process
- Determine the maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) and acceptable data loss for each function
- Calculate the financial and non-financial impact of disruption or loss of each function
- Rank the functions and processes according to their criticality and urgency
- Document the findings and recommendations of the analysis
Step 2: Design a Recovery Strategy
A recovery strategy is your plan of action for restoring critical functions after a disaster. It should spell out your recovery objectives, the solutions you will use, and who does what. The table below compares the 3 most common recovery solutions so you can match each system to the right approach.
| Recovery solution | What it does | Typical recovery speed | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data backup | Copies data to a separate location you can restore from | Hours | Files, records, and systems that can tolerate some downtime |
| Data replication | Keeps a near-live copy of data on standby infrastructure | Minutes | Databases and applications with low data-loss tolerance |
| Failover and failback | Switches operations to a standby system, then back once resolved | Seconds to minutes | Mission-critical systems that cannot go offline |
Your strategy should define recovery objectives (the targets for how fast and how complete recovery must be), the recovery solutions above, and clear roles and responsibilities for every member of your IT team and other stakeholders during and after a disaster.
Related reading on advice from a failed disaster recovery audit.
Step 3: Implement and Test Your Recovery Plan
Once you’ve designed your recovery strategy, you have to implement and test it so it actually works when you need it. Recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) are the benchmarks you measure against, and frameworks like NIST SP 800-34 offer a proven structure. Work through the following.
- Acquire and configure the hardware, software, and network resources for your recovery solutions
- Establish and maintain backup and replication schedules and procedures for your data
- Set up and verify the failover and failback mechanisms for your systems and applications
- Develop and document the recovery procedures and checklists for each disaster scenario
- Run regular, realistic tests of your recovery plan, such as drills, simulations, and exercises
- Measure performance against your RPO and RTO, plus data integrity, availability, and user feedback
- Identify and fix the gaps in your plan, from technical glitches to human errors and process inefficiencies
- Review and revise the plan as your business needs, risks, and technologies change
Step 4: Create Your Disaster Recovery Documentation
Your disaster recovery documentation is the collection of records that captures your plan, strategy, solutions, procedures, roles, responsibilities, and results. Good disaster recovery documentation is what lets a stressed team execute calmly at 2 a.m. Build it out as follows.
- Define the scope, format, and structure, including your policy, plan, run books, reports, and logs
- Collect and organize the relevant data, such as BIA results, recovery objectives, and checklists
- Store and secure the documentation somewhere safe and accessible, like a cloud service or shared drive
- Distribute it to your recovery team and stakeholders so everyone knows the contents and purpose
- Review and update it regularly so it reflects every change to your plan
Learn more about managed IT services in Houston.
Step 5: Train and Educate Your Disaster Recovery Team
Your disaster recovery team is the group responsible for executing and managing the plan when it counts. A documented plan no one has rehearsed will fail under pressure, so invest in the people who run it. Train and educate them as follows.
- Identify and recruit your team members, and assign each of them clear roles and responsibilities
- Train them on your plan, strategy, solutions, procedures, and documentation, plus DR best practices
- Involve them in testing and evaluation, and act on their feedback and suggestions
- Recognize their contribution and keep them motivated to keep learning
- Review their skills regularly and provide coaching and mentoring where needed
Step 6: Coordinate and Integrate Your Plan With Other Plans
A disaster recovery plan is not a standalone document that operates in isolation. It has to connect with your incident response, business continuity, and communication plans so nothing falls through the cracks. Coordinate and integrate it as follows.
- Map the interdependencies and relationships between your DR plan and other plans and processes
- Align your DR objectives, solutions, procedures, and roles with other plans to avoid conflicts
- Keep communication and collaboration channels open with the owners of other plans
- Contribute to the testing and improvement of other plans, and draw on their resources and expertise
- Review and update all plans together so they stay consistent and compatible
Related reading on 7 cybersecurity frameworks that help reduce cyber risk.
Conclusion
Creating a robust disaster recovery plan takes time, effort, and real expertise, and the work never fully stops because your environment keeps changing. If you want help building and managing yours, Uprite IT services has spent more than 20 years delivering reliable, cost-effective disaster recovery to businesses of every size. We run thorough Business Impact Analyses and risk assessments, design scalable recovery strategies for your infrastructure, manage backup, replication, and restoration, and build in dependable failover and failback for your systems and applications.
Want a disaster recovery plan built and tested by engineers who do this every day? Uprite designs, implements, and manages disaster recovery for businesses across Houston, Dallas, and Austin. Talk to an IT recovery expert and protect your operations before the next outage hits.
IT Disaster Recovery Plan FAQs
1. What is an IT disaster recovery plan?
An IT disaster recovery plan outlines strategies and processes to recover and restore IT systems, data, and infrastructure following a disruptive event, such as a cyberattack, natural disaster, or hardware failure.
2. Why is a disaster recovery plan important for my business?
Downtime is expensive. A disaster recovery plan keeps that cost in check by minimizing outages, preventing data loss, and ensuring business continuity so you recover quickly from cyberattacks, outages, and hardware failures while protecting your reputation and revenue.
3. How do I start creating a disaster recovery plan?
Begin by assessing your IT infrastructure and critical systems, identifying potential risks and vulnerabilities, setting recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), and developing a step-by-step recovery process.
4. What are the key components of a disaster recovery plan?
Key components include risk assessment, backup and recovery solutions, emergency communication plans, defined roles and responsibilities, and testing and updating procedures.
5. How often should I update my disaster recovery plan?
Your plan should be reviewed and updated at least annually or after significant changes in your business operations, IT infrastructure, or following a disaster recovery test.
