Operations
Disaster Recovery Plan
Also known as: DRP, DR plan, business continuity plan, BCP
A documented plan specifying what is backed up, how often, where the backup lives, who owns the restore process, and the target time to recover. Without one, the buyer inherits continuity risk they cannot quantify.
WHY IT MATTERS
Why it matters. The buyer's IT diligence team is not asking whether the business has experienced a disaster. They are asking whether the business would survive one. A disaster recovery plan is the document that answers that question. It covers backup scope, backup frequency, storage location, restoration ownership, and the Recovery Time Objective — the maximum acceptable downtime before the business suffers material harm. A business without a plan may have backup routines (a weekly copy to an external drive, a vendor-managed cloud backup) but no tested ability to restore from them. Untested backups are hopes, not backups. The plan itself is inexpensive to create and test. Its absence during diligence signals a pattern — a business that operates on institutional memory with no documented process for what happens when systems or people are unavailable.