Build a data center disaster recovery plan around the business services that must be restored—not around a list of servers. Map each service to its dependencies, agree with business owners on acceptable downtime and data loss, choose recovery arrangements that meet those needs, and document who activates and carries out each step. Then test the plan, fix gaps, and keep it current.
NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1 provides useful foundational guidance for this process, but it is federal guidance published in 2010. Check current legal, regulatory, contractual, and organizational requirements that apply to your organization and jurisdiction.
What a data center disaster recovery plan should do
A disaster recovery plan (DRP) should explain how the organization will respond when a serious disruption makes its primary data center or facility unavailable. It should establish who can declare an outage, how the organization will assess the situation, where operations will move if relocation is necessary, and how recovery teams will coordinate.
Keep that facility-level plan distinct from the procedures for restoring individual systems. NIST describes the DRP as site-specific planning for relocating operations after a major physical disruption; an information system contingency plan (ISCP) contains system-focused recovery procedures that may be used at the primary or an alternate site.
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NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1 organizes contingency planning into seven progressive steps: develop policy, conduct a business impact analysis, identify preventive controls, create contingency strategies, develop the plan, test/train/exercise, and maintain the plan. Use that sequence as a planning framework, adapting it to your current obligations and operating environment.
1. Set policy, scope, and ownership
Before choosing a recovery site or technology, decide which business processes, services, locations, systems, and suppliers the plan covers. Identify an executive sponsor and a coordinator accountable for keeping the plan usable. Name the people or roles responsible for declaring an outage, approving activation, coordinating recovery, and communicating with staff, customers, suppliers, and leadership.
Include contacts for business owners, system and application owners, facilities, networking, security, identity services, data protection, procurement, communications, and relevant third parties. Define alternates for critical roles so recovery does not depend on one person being available.
Coordinate the DRP with related plans rather than combining their distinct purposes. NIST distinguishes several connected plans:
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| Plan | Primary purpose |
|---|---|
| Disaster recovery plan (DRP) | Facility- or site-focused procedures for relocating information systems operations after a major disruption that requires relocation. |
| Information system contingency plan (ISCP) | System-focused assessment and recovery procedures that can be used at the primary site or an alternate site. |
| Business continuity plan (BCP) | Procedures for sustaining business operations while recovery proceeds. |
| Cyber incident response plan | Procedures for identifying, mitigating, and recovering from cyber attacks; coordinate its actions with the DRP and system plans. |
| Occupant emergency plan | First-response procedures for personnel safety and facility emergencies; it is not a substitute for IT recovery procedures. |
For U.S. federal guidance, NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1 was published in May 2010 and its publication record was updated November 11, 2010. NIST provides business impact analysis and low-, moderate-, and high-impact contingency plan templates with the publication. Those templates can help structure planning, but they do not replace organization-specific decisions.
2. Perform a business impact analysis
Start with the business processes the data center supports. For each process, identify the services and applications it depends on, then map those to infrastructure, data, people, facilities, external services, and suppliers. Record dependencies between services as well: a customer-facing application may be unavailable if identity, DNS, network connectivity, or a shared data platform is unavailable.
Work with business owners to assess the consequences of disruption and rank services by recovery priority. Consider operational, financial, legal, contractual, safety, and customer effects that are relevant to your organization. NIST identifies the business impact analysis (BIA) as a core planning step for characterizing systems, processes, and interdependencies.
Use that analysis to agree on measurable recovery expectations for each critical service:
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- Recovery time objective (RTO): the target time within which the service should be restored after disruption.
- Recovery point objective (RPO): the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, expressed as a point in time before the disruption.
Set these objectives with the business owners, based on impact and what the organization can support. There is no single RTO or RPO that is appropriate for every data center or service. Record who approved each objective and any assumptions, such as required operating capacity during recovery.
3. Identify outage scenarios and preventive controls
Consider the disruptions that could affect your site and the services it supports. Depending on the facility, scenarios may include loss of site access, power or cooling failure, network interruption, equipment damage, or a wider event that affects nearby infrastructure and staff.
For each scenario, record existing controls that reduce its likelihood or limit its impact, and note where a control depends on another service or location. NIST gives data replication and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) as examples of contingency controls. The appropriate design, capacity, runtime, and installation for a facility must be determined through its engineering and risk decisions; the examples are not a universal equipment specification.
4. Choose recovery strategies against the service requirements
Compare candidate arrangements against each service’s approved recovery objectives and dependencies. NIST identifies alternate equipment, manual workarounds, and recovery at an alternate location as contingency approaches. Manual procedures are generally suited to short-term disruptions; alternate-location recovery is generally relevant to longer disruptions or physical facility impacts.
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| Approach | Questions to resolve |
|---|---|
| Alternate equipment | What equipment is available, where is it, and can it support the required service capacity and configuration? |
| Manual workaround | Which activities can staff perform without the affected systems, for how long, and how will resulting records or transactions be reconciled? |
| Alternate-location recovery | How will teams access the site, make systems and data available, establish connectivity, and provide staffing and supplier support? |
For each viable option, assess recovery time, the recoverable data point, usable service capacity, dependency coverage, staff and supplier availability, security requirements, activation effort, and lifecycle cost. Consider geographic separation and shared hazards: an alternate site may not help if the same event can disrupt both locations or their common connectivity, power, or suppliers. Record the evidence from tests that supports your assumptions. The cited NIST guidance supports choosing strategies based on impact and disruption type; it does not establish one vendor or architecture as best for every organization.
If recovery will use an alternate site, specify how access will be authorized and how identity, security controls, connectivity, staffing, and suppliers will work there. Document how operations will return to the primary site and how data created during recovery will be reconciled. These are organization-specific implementation decisions, not a single architecture prescribed by NIST.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.5. Write activation and recovery procedures
The plan needs to be executable under pressure. Use clear role names, current contact methods, decision authority, and ordered actions. Include these elements, assigning an owner and a location in the plan for each:
- Activation: conditions that trigger assessment or recovery, who may declare an outage, who authorizes relocation, and how activation is recorded.
- Notification and escalation: who must be contacted, in what order, and how the team proceeds if a contact or supplier is unavailable.
- Safety and initial assessment: coordination with facility emergency procedures, confirmation of personnel safety, site access and damage checks, and a process for updating the situation assessment.
- Recovery order: the service sequence and prerequisites derived from the BIA, including the dependencies that must be available before a service can be validated.
- Restoration and validation: the relevant system runbooks, approved recovery steps, checks that demonstrate the service works, and the business owner who accepts it for use.
- Communications: internal and external communication responsibilities, approved channels, and how updates are maintained during recovery.
- Return to normal operations: the authority and steps for moving back, coordinating the transition, reconciling data, and confirming stable service.
Keep facility relocation instructions separate from system-specific restore and validation runbooks, while linking them clearly. NIST describes the DRP as covering relocation after major facility disruption, with individual system contingency plans then used to restore, recover, test, and return systems to operation.
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6. Test, train, and maintain the plan
A written procedure is not proof that a service can be recovered. Exercise both the decisions and the technical steps. A tabletop exercise can test outage declaration, communications, role coverage, dependencies, and choices between recovery options. Technical tests should establish whether backups, replication, alternate infrastructure, applications, and required dependencies can actually be recovered and validated.
For each exercise, record its objectives, participants, scenario, observed results, gaps, assigned owners, and due dates. Track corrective actions to completion and update the relevant plan or runbook when a test reveals an incorrect assumption. NIST says testing helps evaluate whether procedures are viable, whether recovery staff can implement the plan, and where deficiencies exist.
NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1 recommends reviewing plans at least annually and after significant changes. Review contact lists more often when they change frequently. Also reassess affected plan sections when services, dependencies, sites, suppliers, recovery arrangements, or business requirements change.
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