What is the purpose of a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a specific, documented, and structured approach with instructions for responding to an unplanned incident that affects IT infrastructure. Its primary purpose is to recover and restore an organisation's critical technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster. The DRP is a component of a broader Business Continuity Plan (BCP), but its scope is specifically focused on the IT aspects of recovery, such as servers, networks, databases, and applications, to support essential business functions.

B: This describes an Emergency Response Plan (ERP), which prioritises the immediate safety of personnel and the containment of the initial incident, preceding the D-RP's activation. C: This is the overarching goal of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), which is broader than a DRP and includes all aspects of the business, not just IT systems. D: This is an outcome or objective of the overall business continuity effort after systems are restored. The DRP's purpose is the restoration itself, which enables the return to normal output.

1. CIPS Official Course Book, L5M2 Managing Supply Chain Risk (2018). Chapter 6, Section 5.2, p. 138. The text explicitly states, "A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a documented process or set of procedures to recover and protect a business IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster." This directly aligns with getting critical systems operational.

2. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Special Publication 800-34 Rev. 1, Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems. Section 3.4, p. 21. This guide defines a DRP as a plan that "provides detailed procedures to facilitate recovery of capabilities at an alternate site." The focus is on the recovery of IT capabilities (systems).

3. Vyas, M., & Jha, C. N. (2016). A literature review on business continuity and disaster recovery. International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 15(4), 330-346. This academic review distinguishes between BCP and DRP, noting that "DRP is a subset of BCP and it is more IT focused... The main objective of DRP is to minimize the downtime and data loss." (p. 333). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1504/IJITM.2016.079229