IT Disaster Recovery Planning That Works: A Practical Guide

Every IT leader has a disaster recovery plan. Most of them do not work. That is not cynicism - it is what the data tells us. Industry research consistently shows that over 70% of organisations that test their DR plans discover critical gaps. I have been through enough real incidents to know that the gap between a DR plan document and actual recovery capability is often enormous. The plan says four hours. Reality says four days. If you are an IT leader responsible for keeping systems running, this guide covers how to build a DR plan that survives contact with an actual disaster. Why most DR plans fail The document problem Most DR plans are documents written once, approved by leadership, and filed away. Within six months, they are partially obsolete because infrastructure changes constantly. The assumption problem DR plans are built on assumptions: the network will be available, DNS will resolve, the backup site has capacity, the team will be reachable. Stack them together and you have a