Topic starter
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.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Secureframe: “Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP): Which Frameworks Require It & How to Write One [+ Template]”.
By the numbers:
- The global cost of disasters now exceeds $2.3 trillion annually, according to the 2025 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction cited by Secureframe.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when a disaster recovery plan is treated as a backup checklist?
A: The plan breaks at the point where restoration requires coordination, not storage.
Q: Why do disaster recovery plans matter for compliance as well as resilience?
A: Because many frameworks expect organisations to show that recovery is established, maintained, and exercised, not merely documented.
Q: What are the signs that an identity disaster recovery plan is failing in practice?
A: A failing plan usually shows up as stale backups, missing dependency maps, unclear ownership, and failover tests that only validate individual objects.
Practitioner guidance
- Define recovery ownership by system and service Assign named owners for each critical system, including who can declare disaster status, authorise recovery actions, and verify service restoration.
- Map recovery dependencies end to end Document upstream and downstream dependencies for applications, identity services, backups, network paths, and third-party support before the next test.
- Test privileged access in every recovery run Verify that administrators, service accounts, and emergency access paths still function inside the recovery environment, not just in production.
Bottom line: Disaster recovery has shifted from a technical appendix to a governance control that must prove ownership, dependencies, and restoreability.
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10/07/2026 9:46 pm
Disaster recovery has become a governance control because recovery now depends on access, ownership, and proof, not just backups. A plan that cannot identify who restores what, under which authority, and against which dependencies is not a control. It is a draft. For IAM and GRC teams, the operational question is whether recovery rights, privileged accounts, and approval paths are explicit enough to survive a real outage.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should teams distinguish disaster recovery from business continuity?
A: Business continuity keeps essential operations going during disruption, often through manual or degraded processes, while disaster recovery restores systems, data, and normal service capability after the event. Organisations need both because continuity without restoration can become permanent workaround, and recovery without continuity leaves the business unable to operate while systems come back.
👉 Read our full editorial: Disaster recovery planning is now a governance control, not a backup task