My boss is asking me to prepare the fire incident Plan(IR) and Disaster recovery plan(DR), and how can we determine it is IR / DR. I am no clue on those issue. What should I do?


I think you mean an Incident Response and a Disaster Recovery Plan. These are both essential for Business Continouity.

Incident response is an organized approach to addressing and managing the aftermath of a security breach, attack or serious event (someone has a heart attack, a bomb explodes). The goal is to handle the situation in a way that limits damage and reduces recovery time and costs. This is more short term and can lead, if serious enough, to disaster recovery when the business continiouity is threatened.

Disaster recovery defines what should happen when a serious incident occurs which has direct impact on the business continouity. It's important to know who are the key players and what's everyone's task when we enter into disaster recovery mode.

There are complete books written and courses available on how you should procede when you are to go in DRP mode. This is not something I would build based on "what I've found on the internet". If you ever need to go into DRP mode the last thing you want is a shitty plan and as a fair point of warning, businesses have fallen because of bad disaster recovery planning.

So my advice to you is, if you don't know how it works, don't start on it, hire an experienced firm which is knowledgeable about Disaster Recovery planning.

  • Yes, it completely beyond my knowledge. – Mardok Feb 5 '14 at 7:47


This should be a good sign that you should not be the one planning such things.

An incident response plan is a plan you should follow during the incident to mitigate, reduce and contain the damage. Such a plan should clearly list out what everyone's role is supposed to be and what steps have to be taken so there is no confusion or panic when an incident occurs.

A disaster recovery plan is a plan that hopefully allows the business to recover from damages after the incident has occurred. This could include things like an alternative location to work etc.

  • any link or guide ? Appreciate if there is a template – Mardok Feb 5 '14 at 6:58

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