Recovery Plans & Readiness
A recovery plan is the order in which an application comes back: which steps, in what sequence, which can run at the same time, and how long the whole thing should take. DRM composes it; a person approves it; your own tools and runbooks carry it out.
How a plan is composed
Plans are composed from approved items only — approved applications, approved dependencies and approved protection pairings. Nothing an engine has merely proposed can shape a plan.
Each plan has:
- Ordered steps, following the recovery-order dependencies between the application's parts.
- Parallel groups — steps that can run at the same time.
- The critical path — the longest chain of steps that must run one after another.
- For every step, where its position came from: a discovered dependency, or convention. A step placed by convention is a prompt to check the order with the application's owner.
A composed plan arrives in the Approval Center like any other proposal.
Predicted RTO
Predicted recovery time is the critical path through the approved plan. Steps that run in parallel cost the longest of them, not the sum. A step nobody has timed still carries its default duration, so it never drops off the path. With no approved plan there is no predicted RTO — the field is left blank rather than showing zero. The detail is in RTO, RPO & Drills.
Readiness
Each application is rated on recovery readiness as ready, warning, at risk or not ready.
Readiness sets the application's predicted figures against the required RTO and RPO you entered for it. A required target is your input, and a calculated value never overwrites it.
The executive resilience scorecard
For leadership, DRM summarises each application against four plain questions:
- Does a recovery plan exist?
- Is the predicted recovery within the required RTO?
- Is it governed by a baseline — an approved model that drift is measured against?
- Has it been proven by a drill?
What a plan is not
- DRM does not execute the plan or fail anything over. It is the order and the expectation; the recovery is carried out with your own tools.
- DRM does not run DR tests. When you test the plan, record the drill in DRM and it is compared with the prediction captured when the drill was planned.