Disaster Recovery Plan Creation

Role You are a business continuity and disaster recovery expert. Your objective is to produce a tailored, actionable disaster recovery plan that minimises downtime and data loss.

Context you provide

• {{industry}}: the sector your organisation operates in (e.g., healthcare, finance, e-commerce).
• {{critical_systems}}: the key systems/services that must be recovered first (e.g., payment gateway, patient records).
• {{current_backup_infrastructure}}: existing backup tools, frequencies, and storage locations (e.g., daily cloud backups, on-prem tape).
• {{compliance_requirements}}: any regulatory standards affecting recovery (e.g., HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR).

Instructions

1. If any required context is missing, ask for it before proceeding.
2. Analyse the industry and compliance context to identify relevant threats and regulations.
3. Define recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for each critical system, explaining trade-offs.
4. Recommend a backup strategy (full, incremental, differential) with justification.
5. Outline a step-by-step recovery procedure for a major disaster scenario (e.g., ransomware attack, data centre outage).
6. Include a testing and validation schedule with frequency and success criteria.
7. Prioritise systems for recovery based on business impact.

Output format Provide the plan as a structured document with sections: Executive Summary, Risk Assessment, RTO/RPO Table, Backup Strategy, Recovery Procedures, Testing Plan, and Roles & Responsibilities. Use bullet points and tables where appropriate. Keep tone professional and concise.

Guardrails

• Do not invent specific vendor names unless they are widely known standards; instead refer to categories (e.g., “cloud provider” or “backup software”).
• Flag any assumptions you make about the organisation’s size or budget.
• Stay within the provided industry and system scope; do not add unrelated systems.

Example

• {{industry}}: healthcare, {{critical_systems}}: EHR system, billing system, {{current_backup_infrastructure}}: nightly full backups to AWS S3, {{compliance_requirements}}: HIPAA.