DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) — IT definition

A DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan, French PRA — Plan de Reprise d'Activité) is the technical IT subset of a BCP. It documents precisely how to restore the information system after a disruption — cyberattack, major hardware failure, fire, flood — within two measurable targets: an RTO (maximum time to restore) and an RPO (maximum acceptable data loss).

The stakes are concrete: per the Ponemon Cost of Downtime Report 2024, each hour of IT downtime costs SMBs about $9,000 and large enterprises more than $540,000 on average, ignoring reputation and regulatory impact. For financial institutions under DORA and operators under NIS2, a tested DRP is now a regulatory requirement.

RTO and RPO: the two metrics that shape the DRP

Every DRP rests on two targets, set per application or per business process:

• •RTO (Recovery Time Objective): "how quickly must we be back up?". Minutes for e-commerce, hours for back-office apps, days for non-critical tools.
• •RPO (Recovery Point Objective): "how much data can we afford to lose?". Seconds for a financial transaction, minutes for a CRM, hours for a reporting tool.

These two parameters drive the technical investment: a 4-hour RTO with a 1-hour RPO costs ten times less than a 5-minute RTO with a 0-second RPO.

DRP architectures

Depending on RTO/RPO targets:

• •Cold standby: unequipped secondary site, restore from backups. RTO of days, RPO of hours.
• •Warm standby: pre-installed but powered-off infrastructure, asynchronous replication. RTO of hours, RPO of minutes.
• •Hot standby (active/passive): ready infrastructure, synchronous replication, automated failover. RTO of minutes, RPO of seconds.
• •Active-active: simultaneous production across multiple sites, RTO and RPO close to zero. The hyperscaler multi-region pattern.

DRP steps

1. Impact analysis: identify critical applications, their dependencies, their target RTO/RPO.
2. Target architecture: backups, replication, sites, failover.
3. Procedure documentation: detailed runbooks, automation scripts, network diagrams, contacts.
4. Regular tests: backup restore, partial failover, full annual exercise.
5. Continuous improvement: lessons learned, updates after every major change.

Backups are not a DRP

A common mistake: "we have backups, so we have a DRP". Wrong. A backup is data. A DRP is a tested process that turns backups into restored services. Without documented procedures, tests, and business coordination, backups don't help during a crisis.

The 3-2-1 rule remains the backup minimum:

• •3: copies of the data.
• •2: different media.
• •1: copy off-site (ideally air-gapped to survive ransomware).

DRP and ransomware: the new reality

Cyberattacks have rewritten DRP expectations. Ransomware deliberately targets backups: per Veeam Data Protection Trends 2024, 75 % of attacked companies had their backups targeted, and 39 % ended up with corrupted or encrypted backups. Hence the importance of:

• •Immutable backups: cannot be modified or deleted within a defined retention window.
• •Logical or physical air-gap: backups disconnected from the network.
• •Regular restore tests: from those backups.

Testing the DRP

Exercise types:

• •Unit restore test: one application, in pre-production.
• •Partial failover test: one secondary site, no production impact.
• •Full failover: complete switchover to the secondary site. At least annually for critical apps.
• •Game day: real fault injection, teams in operational conditions.

DRP and application visibility

A credible DRP requires knowing precisely which applications must be restored, in what order, and with what dependencies. Without an up-to-date application map, restore order is guesswork — and in a real crisis, that uncertainty is what prolongs outages. Kabeen provides the live map of applications, their dependencies, and their business use to make the DRP actionable.