A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is the documented set of procedures for restoring a technology system or application to operational status following a disruptive event — hardware failure, data corruption, cyber incident, or natural disaster. It defines the recovery objectives the plan must achieve (how quickly, and with how much data loss), the specific technical and procedural steps required to recover each system component, the roles and responsibilities of the recovery team, the communication protocol during a recovery event, and the schedule for testing the plan to confirm it remains executable. For ERP and EPM applications supporting financial close and statutory reporting, the DRP is a regulatory and governance expectation — particularly in Saudi Arabia under the SAMA IT governance framework and in Egypt under CBE guidelines for financial institutions.
Core DRP Components
| Component | Content |
|---|---|
| Recovery objectives | Recovery Point Objective (RPO): maximum acceptable data loss, in hours. Recovery Time Objective (RTO): maximum acceptable recovery time, in hours. Both must be defined per system tier. |
| System inventory | All systems covered by the plan, their criticality tier, their dependencies, and the recovery sequence (the order in which systems must be restored) |
| Recovery procedures | Step-by-step technical recovery procedures for each system — not high-level descriptions, but executable instructions with command syntax, configuration reference, and verification steps |
| Role assignments | Named individuals (not roles) with their specific responsibilities during a recovery event, their contact details, and their alternates |
| Communication protocol | Who is notified at what stage of a recovery event, through what channel, and with what information — covering both internal stakeholders and external parties (regulators, auditors, key customers) |
| Test schedule | Frequency and scope of DRP tests — tabletop exercises, partial recovery tests, and full recovery rehearsals — with sign-off requirements for test completion |
Common Gaps and Failure Modes
The specific failure that renders a DRP non-executable in a recovery event is recovery procedures written at a level of abstraction that assumes knowledge not documented in the plan. A procedure that states “restore Oracle EPM Cloud backup” is not an executable recovery instruction. A named recovery team member — who may be unavailable during an actual disaster event — may know what this means. Their replacement does not. A DRP must be executable by a technically competent person who has not previously performed the specific recovery procedure — meaning every command, every configuration reference, and every verification step must be written explicitly. DRPs written by the people who could perform the recovery from memory are reliably inadequate for any person who cannot.
How Loop Wise Solutions Produces This
Loop Wise Solutions reviews and, where required, produces the DRP as part of implementation quality assurance — specifically confirming that the RPO and RTO targets defined in the NFR document are achievable with the backup and recovery design implemented for the production environment. For Oracle EPM Cloud implementations, we verify that the Oracle-managed backup schedule meets the RPO requirement and that the client’s recovery procedures cover the steps that Oracle does not perform automatically — application configuration restoration, Data Management rule recovery, and user access re-provisioning. We recommend DRP testing within 90 days of go-live, while recovery knowledge is current in the team.
