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What is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery is the plan that gets your IT running again after an outage or attack. See what RTO/RPO mean, and what a good plan contains.

In short

Disaster recovery is the combined plan and technical solutions that get your IT systems running again after a serious outage, whether the cause is ransomware, a power failure, fire or human error.

Where backup is about having a copy of your data, disaster recovery is about the entire restoration: which systems come up first, who does what, and how quickly the business is operational again. Two key metrics govern the plan: RTO, the maximum acceptable downtime, and RPO, the amount of data you can afford to lose.

For Danish SMBs, a tested DR plan is often the difference between a few hours of disruption and weeks of downtime, and with NIS2, documented preparedness is also becoming a legal requirement for many industries. MI Support IT prepares and tests disaster recovery plans and operates the backup and restoration solutions that turn the plan into reality.

Back to the glossary

What is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) is your emergency plan for IT: the combination of plan, responsibilities and technical solutions that brings systems, data and workplaces back into operation after a serious outage. The cause may be a ransomware attack, a power outage, a failed server, fire or human error. The result is the same: the business stands still until IT is back up.

A disaster recovery plan answers the questions nobody has time to discuss in the middle of a crisis: Which systems are most critical? Who decides what? Where are the clean copies of the data? And how long may it all take? The EU cybersecurity agency ENISA points to exactly preparedness and recovery capability as a core element of business resilience.

What do RTO and RPO mean?

The two most important metrics in any DR plan are:

  • RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How quickly must the system be back up? An RTO of 4 hours means the business accepts a maximum of 4 hours of downtime.
  • RPO (Recovery Point Objective): How old may the restored data be? An RPO of 1 hour means you lose at most one hour of work, and therefore requires backups at least every hour.

An example: your finance system might have an RTO of 4 hours and an RPO of 1 hour, while an internal file archive can live with an RTO of 24 hours and an RPO of a day. The point is that not all systems are equally critical, and the requirements determine which technology and which budget are needed.

Disaster recovery vs. backup

Backup is a prerequisite for disaster recovery, but not the same thing. Backup is the copy of your data; disaster recovery is the entire process that turns the copy into a running business again: rebuilding servers, networks and access, the order of restoration, communication to employees and customers, and testing that it all actually works. Many companies have backups, but far fewer have a plan for what should happen in the first 24 hours after a total outage.

What should a DR plan contain?

A good disaster recovery plan (or IT emergency plan) should at a minimum include:

  1. System overview with prioritisation: Which systems come up first, with RTO/RPO per system.
  2. Roles and responsibilities: Who activates the plan, who restores, who communicates.
  3. Restoration procedures: Step by step, including for when the documentation itself sits on a locked server.
  4. Contact list and escalation: Suppliers, insurance, authorities and any reporting obligations under NIS2.
  5. Regular tests: A plan that has never been rehearsed is a hypothesis, not preparedness.

See also our page on the IT contingency plan, which goes into depth on the contents.

How MI Support IT helps

MI Support IT helps Danish SMBs across the whole chain: we prepare and maintain your IT contingency plan, define RTO and RPO together with the business and deliver the backup solutions that make the targets realistic, including documented restoration tests. Contact us if your DR plan needs a review, or does not exist yet.

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