Disaster Recovery Planning and Alternate Operations
Plans that work when primary operations are unavailable
The exam tests whether you can turn BIA outputs into a DR plan and alternate operating model. A DR plan covers the recovery of technology and data; business continuity covers the continued delivery of products and services, often through manual workarounds. Alternate operations may include a hot, warm, or cold site, cloud failover, mobile recovery, reciprocal agreements, or manual processing. The choice depends on RTO, RPO, cost, and risk.
Core rules
- Define activation criteria and authority. A plan that cannot be activated quickly is a document, not a capability.
- Include roles and successors, call trees, vendor contacts, dependency maps, runbooks, configuration baselines, and minimum operating requirements.
- Alternate sites need network, identity, data, workspace, staffing, equipment, and supplies. Test connectivity and capacity, not just building access.
- Document manual workarounds: paper forms, alternate payment methods, temporary delegation of authority, and reconciliation steps after restoration.
- Plan for reconstitution: return to primary, validate data, reconcile transactions, retire temporary controls, and capture lessons.
- Keep copies offline and outside the primary environment; version-control the plan.
Worked example
A manufacturer's ERP has an RTO of 24 hours. The plan activates a warm site with replicated infrastructure, but the business also needs to ship orders. The continuity team pre-approves a manual order-entry spreadsheet, a delegated credit-approval threshold, and a courier exception process. During a test, the warm site restores in 20 hours, but the manual process produces duplicate orders because reconciliation was undefined. The corrective action adds a unique manual order number and a daily reconciliation checkpoint.
Traps
Do not store the only DR plan on the file share that fails. Do not assume staff are available or trained. Do not plan technology recovery without business workarounds. Do not ignore capacity, licenses, and dependent vendors at the alternate site. Do not stop at restoration-reconstitution and reconciliation are part of recovery.