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.

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[1] Such a plan, ordinarily documented in written form, specifies procedures an organization is to follow in the event of a disaster. It is "a comprehensive statement of consistent actions to be taken before, during and after a disaster"

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[2] The disaster could be natural, environmental or man-made. Man-made disasters could be intentional (for example, an act of a terrorist) or unintentional (that is, accidental, such as the breakage of a man-made dam).

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Given organizations' increasing dependency on information technology to run their operations, a disaster recovery plan, sometimes erroneously called a Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP), is increasingly associated with the recovery of information technology data, assets, and facilities.

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According to the SANS institute, the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a comprehensive organizational plan that includes the disaster recovery plan. The Institute further states that a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) consists of the five component plans:[6]

• Business Resumption Plan

• Occupant Emergency Plan

• Continuity of Operations Plan

• Incident Management Plan

• Disaster Recovery Plan

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The Institute states that the first three plans (Business Resumption, Occupant Emergency, and Continuity of Operations Plans) do not deal with the IT infrastructure. They further state that the Incident Management Plan (IMP) does deal with the IT infrastructure, but since it establishes structure and procedures to address cyber attacks against an organization’s IT systems, it generally does not represent an agent for activating the Disaster Recovery Plan, leaving The Disaster Recovery Plan as the only BCP component of interest to IT.[6]

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Disaster  Recovery  Institute International states that disaster recovery is the area of business continuity that deals with technology recovery as opposed to the recovery of business operations.[7]

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