Recovery strategy defines what restoration should achieve and how the organization will get there after a disruption. It sets the objectives that guide every recovery decision, most notably how quickly systems must return and how much data loss is tolerable, and aligns those targets with what the business actually needs.

Within the Recovery phase, strategy comes before action. When systems are down, there is no time to debate priorities or invent an approach. A clear strategy, decided in advance, tells responders which systems to restore first, to what state, and by when, so recovery proceeds in a deliberate order rather than by improvisation.

In practice, strategy is expressed through recovery objectives: the recovery time objective, or how long a service can be unavailable, and the recovery point objective, or how much recent data can be lost. These targets are set per system according to business impact, then supported by disaster recovery planning that specifies backups, alternate sites, failover arrangements, and dependencies. The strategy is documented, approved by leadership, and revisited as the organization changes, so that recovery capability keeps pace with what the business depends on.

References#

• NIST SP 800-34, Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems
• ISO 22301, Business Continuity Management Systems