Disaster recovery
Also known as DR
The process and capability for restoring IT systems after a major failure or destructive event.
DR is the technology half of resilience: how servers, data, and connectivity come back, in what order, and how quickly. It is defined by the recovery objectives the business has set.
A DR capability that has never been exercised is a hypothesis. The dependencies that break a recovery, such as an application needing a licence server that was also lost, only reveal themselves in a real attempt.
Where this comes up
Disaster recovery sits inside our backup and disaster recovery work. If you are trying to work out what this means for your own environment rather than in the abstract, that is the page worth reading next, and a short call will get you a straight answer faster than either.