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10/07/2026 9:23 pm
TL;DR: Disaster recovery planning has shifted from an IT checklist to a governance requirement as outages, data loss, and compliance exposure rise across frameworks including NIST CSF 2.0, NIST 800-53, DORA, and ISO 27001, according to Secureframe. The real issue is not whether a DRP exists, but whether recovery roles, dependencies, and testing are specific enough to restore critical services under stress.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Secureframe: Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP): Which Frameworks Require It & How to Write One [+ Template]
By the numbers:
- 100% of technology companies surveyed lost revenue from outages in the prior year, experiencing an average of 86 outages that cost between $10,000 to over $1 million.
- 87% of IT professionals experienced SaaS data loss in the past twelve months, and only 14% feel confident they can recover critical SaaS data within minutes.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when a disaster recovery plan does not include identity recovery?
A: The most common failure is that systems come back before the organisation can safely administer them.
Q: Why do disaster recovery plans need to cover governance, not just technology?
A: Because recovery is a controlled business process, not a pure infrastructure task.
Q: How do organisations know whether their disaster recovery plan is actually working?
A: They test whether critical services can be restored within the stated RTO and RPO, whether the right people can access the right systems, and whether runbooks can be executed in order.
Practitioner guidance
- Define recovery ownership for identity-dependent services Assign a named owner for each critical recovery path, including identity providers, privileged accounts, service accounts, and emergency admin access.
- Test identity restoration as part of DR exercises Run recovery tests that include authentication, authorisation, and service account reactivation, not only server restore and database failover.
- Map DRP evidence to framework controls Tie your plan to NIST CSF contingency expectations, NIST SP 800-53 CP controls, and ISO 27001 continuity requirements.
What's in the full article
Secureframe's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step DRP template sections for backup recovery, redundant infrastructure, alternate worksites, and communications.
- Framework-by-framework requirement mapping for HIPAA, DORA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, CMMC, and NIST 800-53.
- Practical examples of RTO and RPO tables, testing cadence, and validation checkpoints for different environments.
- A sample DRP structure showing how to write recovery stages, responsibilities, and escalation paths.
👉 Read Secureframe's disaster recovery plan template and framework mapping →
Disaster recovery plans: what IAM and GRC teams should pressure-test?
Explore further
10/07/2026 9:46 pm
Recovery planning is now an identity governance issue as much as an infrastructure issue. A DRP that only restores servers and storage leaves a gap where privileged access, service accounts, and authentication paths are not explicitly recoverable. In modern environments, the first thing that fails may be the ability to administer the platform. Practitioners should treat access restoration as part of operational resilience, not an afterthought.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when disaster recovery fails to restore business services?
A: Accountability should sit with the owners of the critical service, the recovery control, and the identity layer that enables access. In practice, that means security, infrastructure, and application owners share responsibility, but named control owners must be able to show tested procedures, approval history, and operational evidence. Auditors will ask for proof, not intention.
👉 Read our full editorial: Disaster recovery planning is now a governance control, not a backup task
