Disaster recovery readiness checklist

Why run this

What this checklist is for

In a manufacturing business the recovery objective should be expressed in shifts, not days, because that is the unit in which the cost accumulates.

Most recovery plans are written by IT and describe system restoration. The useful version starts from what production needs to run and works backwards.

Run it with

Operations director and CIO jointly

And with

Infrastructure and application owners

And with

Plant management

The checklist

20 checks, in the order we would run them

Tick only what you can genuinely evidence today. An item you intend to do is not an item you have done, and scoring yourself generously here only produces a comfortable number and an uncomfortable project.

Section 1

Objectives and dependencies

Set by the business, not by IT.

Recovery time objective expressed in shifts and agreed by operationsThe number should come from what production can absorb, not from what infrastructure can achieve.
Recovery point objective agreed per system, not organization-wideLosing an hour of production data and an hour of email are different problems with different costs.
Systems ranked by what production actually needs to resumeMES, scheduling and quality before email and reporting. Rank it deliberately.
Application dependencies mapped, including undocumented integrationsThe dependency nobody knew about is what turns a planned recovery into an improvised one.
Plant-adjacent systems included in the plan, not treated as separateThe line does not care which team owns the system that stopped it.

Section 2

Technical readiness

Whether the mechanism exists and functions.

Backups are immutable and unreachable from the production domainA backup an attacker or a failure can reach is not a recovery position.
Replication configured for the systems whose objective requires itBackup and replication solve different problems. Match the mechanism to the stated objective.
A secondary region or site is provisioned and currentA cold standby that has not been patched in a year is a project, not a recovery position.
Recovery runbooks exist per system, written to be followed under pressureWritten for somebody tired, at 3am, who did not build the system.
Configuration is defined as code so an environment can be rebuiltRebuilding from documentation is slower and less reliable than rebuilding from a repository.

Section 3

Rehearsal

The only thing that converts a plan into a capability.

A full recovery has been rehearsed within the last twelve monthsPartial tests validate components. The rehearsal validates the plan.
Identity restoration was included and practised firstNothing else can be restored until people can authenticate. Routinely underestimated.
Operations participated rather than observingAn IT-only exercise validates the technology and misses the operational reality.
Timings were recorded and compared against the stated objectivesA rehearsal without timings tells you it is possible, not whether it is fast enough.
Findings were assigned to owners with datesEvery rehearsal produces findings. A rehearsal whose findings were not actioned was a training exercise.

Section 4

Operating during an outage

The half the plan usually omits.

Manual production procedures exist for a defined periodThe plant may be able to run on paper for a shift. Knowing whether changes the recovery calculus.
Communication plan covers staff, customers and suppliersIncluding who speaks and within what timeframe your contracts require.
Key contacts and runbooks are available without network accessStored on the network share is not available during the event they exist for.
Insurance notification requirements are known and reachable out of hoursPolicies carry notification windows. Missing one is an avoidable second problem.
A decision-maker is nominated with authority to declare a disasterDeclaring it late is the most common and most expensive delay in a real event.

What your score means

Read this against the number above

These bands are deliberately blunt. The middle band is where most organizations honestly sit, and it is a perfectly reasonable place to proceed from — provided the gaps are written down with owners rather than carried as optimism.

0–59%Significant gaps

Do not proceed yet. More than four in ten items are unaddressed, and the ones that fail here are usually the foundational ones that make everything after them harder.

60–84%Mostly ready, with known gaps

Proceed on a defined scope, with the outstanding items written into the plan as risks with owners and dates. This is the most common honest position.

85–100%Ready

The remaining gaps are small enough to handle during delivery rather than before it. Confirm the unticked items are genuinely minor rather than simply unexamined.

Your score highlights automatically as you tick items above. Nothing is saved, sent or tracked — refreshing the page clears it.

Closing the gaps

If you could not tick these, start here

The four items below are the ones whose absence causes the most trouble downstream. If your unticked items include any of these, they are worth addressing before the rest.

Objective set by IT

Get the number from operations, expressed in shifts. A technically achievable target that does not match production tolerance is the wrong target.

Never rehearsed at full scale

Schedule it. Every organization that does this properly finds a dependency nobody mapped, and finding it on a planned Saturday is cheap.

Runbooks written for the author

Rewrite for somebody tired who did not build the system. Test by having a different engineer follow one.

No declaration authority

Name the person. Late declaration is the most common cause of avoidable extended downtime.

Want a second opinion on your score?

We will assess your current position against the objectives operations actually needs, and facilitate a rehearsal with plant management present.

Talk through your result Read the related guides We reply to every message within one business day.

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What this checklist is for

Run it with

And with

And with

20 checks, in the order we would run them

Objectives and dependencies

Technical readiness

Rehearsal

Operating during an outage

Read this against the number above

If you could not tick these, start here

Objective set by IT

Never rehearsed at full scale

Runbooks written for the author

No declaration authority

Want a second opinion on your score?

Related checklists

Inventory count readiness checklist

Manufacturing data quality audit

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