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What should a data-center disaster recovery plan cover?
A usable plan connects business impact to technical recovery. It identifies the services that matter, the order and dependencies in which they must return, the time and data-loss limits their owners will accept, and the people and resources needed to meet those limits. A second site or replication link is only one component.
Start with the service the customer, employee, or public relies on, then map the applications and infrastructure that deliver it. Include databases, identity and access systems, DNS, network links, telecoms, cloud control planes, facilities, power, cooling, software licences, suppliers, and specialist staff. Record which services must recover together and which can wait.
For South African national and provincial departments, government components, and specified public-service contexts, the DPSA account of the ICT Determination and Directive describes prioritising business functions and supporting ICT systems, assigning recovery responsibilities, defining an ICT disaster, and establishing an ICT Disaster Recovery Team. It reports an effective date of 29 November 2022. That scope does not automatically extend to private organizations.
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How do you set RTO and RPO?
Set targets with the business owner of each service, not as a single data-center-wide number.
- RTO (recovery time objective) is the maximum tolerable time to restore the service.
- RPO (recovery point objective) is the maximum tolerable data loss, expressed as time between the latest recoverable data and the disruption.
Agree what “restored” means: for example, whether a minimum or degraded service is acceptable, which users and transactions must work, and what data can be temporarily unavailable. Then check that network capacity, compute, storage, licences, staff, supplier response, and recovery procedures can plausibly meet the targets. A replication interval or provider SLA does not by itself demonstrate that the complete service can be restored within the agreed RTO.
The following are workload targets in a National Lotteries Commission procurement with a 2026 procurement identifier; its publication date was not confirmed in the inspected text. They are examples of one buyer’s assumptions, not industry benchmarks or rules.
| Workload tier in the procurement | RTO | RPO |
|---|---|---|
| Critical workloads | 1–3 hours | 15 minutes–1 hour |
| Important business workloads | 3–6 hours | 1–4 hours |
| Operational workloads | 6–36 hours | 4–24 hours |
| Non-critical/archive workloads | 36–72+ hours | 24–72+ hours |
A separate National Development Agency hosted-site tender published in January 2026 asks for critical-system RTO of no more than two hours and RPO of no more than 15 minutes. That is the agency’s procurement requirement, not a national threshold. The difference between the two examples is a reason to derive targets from your own business impact and obligations rather than copy a tender figure.
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How should you choose the recovery site and architecture?
Compare options against each service’s agreed targets and the failure modes you need to withstand. Geographic separation can reduce exposure to a local incident, but it is not sufficient if both sites rely on the same vulnerable power supply, carrier, identity service, flood zone, or operational team.
| Recovery approach | Assess before choosing |
|---|---|
| Second owned or colocation data center | Geographic and hazard separation; shared utilities and carriers; reserved capacity; staffing; hardware lifecycle; operating cost; and whether exercises can realistically use the reserved environment. |
| Cloud recovery or DRaaS | Local region and site details; workload compatibility; guaranteed recovery capacity; identity and network dependencies; data-location terms; security controls; service-level definitions; and exit and failback procedures. |
| Backup-led rebuild | Backup isolation and immutability; restore throughput; clean-room capability; software and configuration recovery; licences and keys; and whether rebuilding fits the service’s RTO. |
A National Lotteries Commission procurement specifies that its secondary cloud data center should not be in the same municipality as its current center. This is an example of a buyer making separation a contractual requirement; it does not establish a minimum distance for other organizations. Choose separation based on the hazards and shared dependencies that matter to your locations, and verify the provider’s actual site and dependency information rather than relying on a generic “different region” label.
A National Development Agency tender published in January 2026 seeks South Africa-hosted DRaaS and specifies local hosting, a minimum uptime SLA, encryption, near-real-time replication, immutability, and quarterly failover simulations. These are the agency’s procurement specifications, not independent evidence that a particular provider will deliver them. Translate any such terms into measurable contract language and acceptance tests.
How do you protect recovery data and the recovery path?
A recovery copy is useful only if it remains available, usable, and trustworthy after the incident that affected production. Document the backup schedule and retention period, encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, separation of administrative credentials, off-site copies, immutability or other protections against alteration and deletion, and monitoring for failed or unusual backup activity.
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Include the recovery dependencies often missed in a backup inventory: software versions, configuration, encryption keys, credentials, licences, network and DNS settings, and the process for recovering privileged access. Protect the backup management system and its credentials from the same failure domain as the systems it is intended to recover. Define who can change retention or delete copies, and how those actions are logged and reviewed.
The National Lotteries Commission procurement defines immutability as preventing modification or deletion for a specified period and calls for recovery checks of accessibility, readability, and integrity. Those checks are practical acceptance criteria: a job marked “successful” is not proof that the required files can be read and restored.
Who makes decisions during a disaster?
Name an incident commander, technical recovery leads, business service owners, security lead, communications contact, and supplier contacts. State who has authority to declare a disaster, invoke failover, accept degraded service, and authorize failback. Keep contact methods that do not depend solely on the failed facility, network, or identity service.
Make the decision path explicit in the runbook. Include escalation thresholds, how incident facts are verified, how affected teams and users are informed, and who records decisions and timings. Public-service departments subject to the DPSA framework should align these roles with the directive’s described recovery-team and responsibility requirements.
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How often should disaster recovery be tested?
Use exercises to demonstrate that both service recovery and data restoration work under realistic conditions. Test scenarios relevant to your risk profile, such as loss of a facility, regional power disruption, carrier or network failure, ransomware or other cyberattack, corrupted data, and supplier or cloud control-plane outage.
- Exercise failover: invoke the documented decision process and move the selected service to recovery capacity. Measure elapsed time to the agreed restored-service condition and compare it with the RTO.
- Test backup restoration separately: restore representative data into an appropriate environment and check access, readability, integrity, and consistency with dependent systems. Record the recoverable point against the RPO.
- Capture operational evidence: log decision delays, missing dependencies, communications failures, capacity constraints, costs, and any manual steps that were not documented.
- Close the findings: assign each corrective action an owner and due date, then retest material fixes. Keep results and recommendations with the plan.
Published procurement examples specify different cadences, not a universal schedule:
| Buyer or procurement | Specified exercise cadence |
|---|---|
| National Lotteries Commission procurement; publication date not confirmed in inspected text, 2026 procurement identifier | Failover tests twice per year; backup and restoration tests quarterly. |
| National Development Agency hosted-site tender, January 2026 | Quarterly failover simulations. |
| International Trade Administration Commission panel terms, 2026 | Bi-annual disaster recovery simulations and quarterly backup recovery tests, with documented results and recommendations. |
Set your actual cadence from applicable law and regulation, contracts, risk, and organizational policy. Increase testing when a major system, supplier, site, or recovery procedure changes; a tabletop discussion may expose decision gaps but does not replace a technical restoration test.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How should you plan failback and keep the plan current?
Returning to the primary site can create as much risk as failing over. Define the conditions for declaring it safe, the authority to approve return, how transactions and data created at the recovery site will be reconciled, and how service integrity will be checked before users move back. The National Lotteries Commission procurement explicitly includes restoring operations to the primary production site after a disaster.
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Maintain current diagrams, inventories, runbooks, supplier contacts, and recovery credentials. Revisit them after architecture or staffing changes, acquisitions, supplier changes, incidents, and exercises. Make sure a plan remains executable by the people who may actually be on call, not only by its original authors.
Which South African legal or regulatory duties may apply?
Determine obligations from your organization’s sector, data, contracts, and statutory status. The cited laws and public-sector documents have distinct scopes and should not be generalized into requirements for every data-center operator.
- Electronic Communications and Transactions Act: its critical-database provisions include disaster-recovery plans for loss of critical databases among matters to be addressed by regulations. This provision alone should not be described as a complete disaster-recovery standard for every business.
- Critical Infrastructure Protection Act 8 of 2019: provides for identification and declaration of critical infrastructure and measures for its protection, safeguarding, and resilience. Whether a particular facility is covered depends on the statutory process and facts; a data center is not automatically declared critical infrastructure. The government page lists commencement of specified provisions on 30 April 2022. Its stated purpose includes “to provide for measures to be put in place for the protection, safeguarding and resilience of critical infrastructure”.
- DPSA ICT Determination and Directive: the DPSA account describes application to national and provincial departments, government components, and specified public-service contexts, with an effective date of 29 November 2022. It is not a blanket private-sector rule.
- Joint Standard 1 of 2026: the South African Reserve Bank Prudential Authority’s Joint Communication 3 of 2026, dated 28 April 2026, announces minimum recovery-plan requirements for market infrastructures. The Authority describes the standard as designed “to enable the market infrastructure to recover from such a threat while continuing to provide its critical services without requiring the use of resolution powers”. Its named scope is market infrastructures; financial entities should verify whether and how it applies to them.
Public tenders may require POPIA compliance, local hosting, or data-sovereignty provisions for a particular purchase. A tender term establishes that buyer’s requirement, not a blanket data-localization rule. Establish the obligations for your own data and cross-border processing with appropriate legal and regulatory advice.
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