# What is Disaster Recovery?

> Disaster recovery is the coordinated restoration of technology services, infrastructure, and data after a serious disruption.

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## Content

Its objective is to return the technical capabilities needed by prioritized business operations within agreed time and data-loss tolerances. Recovery may involve alternate sites, rebuilt environments, replacement equipment, replicated services, restored backups, and manual technical procedures.

A disaster recovery plan should translate business priorities into system dependencies, recovery sequences, roles, decision authority, and verified procedures. It needs more than application data: identity services, networks, keys, configuration, licenses, monitoring, clean administrative access, and external providers may all be prerequisites. After a cyber incident, teams must also avoid restoring compromised systems or reintroducing the original weakness.

### Key points

- **Recovery objectives:** Use the business impact analysis to define recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives, minimum capacity, and the order in which dependent services return.
- **Plan contents:** Document triggers, roles, communications, alternate resources, restore sources, credentials, system build information, validation criteria, and fallback options.
- **Exercise coverage:** Test component restores and end-to-end business transactions under realistic assumptions, including loss of staff, primary identity systems, facilities, or suppliers.
- **Important limitation:** Backups, replication, and failover are inputs to recovery, not proof that recovery will work. Corrupted data, shared control planes, missing dependencies, or an unremoved attacker can make a technically successful restore unsafe.

### Related terms

[Business continuity](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/business-continuity/>) · [Backup](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/backup/>) · [Recovery time objective (RTO)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/recovery-time-objective/>) · [Recovery point objective (RPO)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/recovery-point-objective/>) · [Cyber recovery](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cyber-recovery/>) · [Maximum tolerable downtime (MTD)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/maximum-tolerable-downtime/>)

### Sources

[NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/34/r1/upd1/final) · [NIST contingency planning resources](https://csrc.nist.gov/topics/security-and-privacy/security-programs-and-operations/contingency-planning) · [Ready.gov emergency and continuity plans](https://www.ready.gov/business/emergency-plans)

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