Disaster Recovery Plan Development, Testing, and Maintenance
What the exam tests
This domain tests plan content, activation logic, exercise design, and maintenance triggers - the evidence that recovery can actually be executed.
Core rules
- A DR plan states purpose, scope, roles, contact and call trees, activation criteria and authority, recovery procedures, dependencies, communications, sequence, and appendices.
- Plans should be usable under stress: clear decision points, checklists, timestamps, and accessible copies offline.
- Exercise types include tabletop, walkthrough, simulation, parallel test, and full failover. Choose by objective, risk, and cost; define scope, safety controls, success criteria, and rollback.
- Test call trees, data restore, dependency assumptions, and third-party response - not just backup jobs.
- Maintain plans after changes, exercises, incidents, audits, and supplier changes. Track corrective actions to closure and review at management level.
Worked example
A Tier 1 payment service runs a semiannual failover exercise and an annual tabletop for executives. The failover objective is to restore within the 4-hour RTO and verify the 15-minute RPO using transaction counts. The tabletop tests declaration authority and crisis communications. Findings - an outdated gateway contact and a missing DNS step - become owned actions with dates. Reasoning: technical tests prove recovery; tabletops prove decision-making and coordination.
Traps
Testing only backup completion; storing the only plan on the primary network; failing to validate contact lists; not updating after architecture change; and treating an audit as an exercise.