There tends to be a fair amount of confusion regarding what Disaster Recovery is all about, what areas of risk it covers and why it's so important to mitigate risk by having a disaster recovery plan. In this introduction we provide a definition for Disaster Recovery Planning, we look at why DR is becoming a more visible business priority and we discuss the terms used to refer to disaster recovery planning and the scope of different plans.

Once you have selected a Disaster Recovery strategy and laid the foundations for Disaster Recovery in your organization, you need to put together the documentation that will make up your Disaster Recovery Plan. For all except the smallest of organizations this will be more than just one document and these plans will need to be constantly reviewed and updated. In this tutorial we give an overview of the DR documentation you'll be putting together.

The first step in developing a disaster recovery plan is to work with the business to determine the objectives for your plan. This includes determining metrics such as the Recovery Time Objective and the Recovery Point Objective for critical business processes, which you can then map to your IT environment. This tutorial gets you started with determining the objectives for your plan.

In the previous tutorials, you should have determined the Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for critical business processes and mapped those to various parts of your IT infrastructure. In this chapter we'll review the primary disaster recovery strategies that may be appropriate based on your objectives and budget.