How do organizations prioritize assets in DR planning?

Organizations prioritize assets in disaster recovery (DR) planning by first identifying which systems, applications, and data are most critical to business continuity. This involves evaluating the impact of downtime, potential data loss, and dependencies between components. Key metrics like Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) guide this process. RTO defines how quickly a system must be restored, while RPO determines the maximum acceptable data loss. For example, a payment processing system with an RTO of 15 minutes will be prioritized over an internal reporting tool with an RTO of 24 hours. This ensures resources focus on minimizing disruption to high-value operations.

Prioritization often involves categorizing assets into tiers. Tier 0 includes mission-critical systems that require near-instant recovery, such as customer-facing APIs or databases supporting real-time transactions. Tier 1 covers important but non-urgent systems, like internal communication tools or secondary data stores. Lower tiers might include development environments or archived data. Dependencies also play a role: a backend service relied on by multiple applications might be upgraded in priority even if it isn’t directly customer-facing. For instance, an authentication service used by all applications would be prioritized to avoid cascading failures across systems.

Finally, organizations validate and adjust priorities through testing. Regular DR drills reveal gaps, such as overlooked dependencies or unrealistic RTO/RPO assumptions. For example, a simulated outage might show that restoring a database requires rebuilding a middleware layer first, prompting a revision of recovery steps. Teams also update priorities as infrastructure evolves—like shifting focus to cloud-based workloads after a migration. This iterative process ensures DR plans stay aligned with current technical and business needs, balancing cost, complexity, and risk effectively.