A disaster recovery plan needs to be well structured and exhaustive in their coverage of activities to either eliminate business losses or at least reduce the impact of damage that may be caused by disasters and calamities. Creating, maintaining and publishing a disaster recovery plan template is a very important activity in any organization and in fact, most business entities have specialized teams to maintain and propagate them internally and externally. DRPs are an essential aspect of business plans and are of paramount importance when it comes to client comfort and stakeholder assurance. A well designed disaster recovery plan indicates the organizations ability to plan for contingencies, their grasp of business modalities and their robustness of business structure.

Employees Awareness and readiness: A disaster recovery plan must have the capability to familiarize all the employees with the implications of business non continuity, risks involved with gaps in operations, plans to overcome the risks, instructions for performing critical activities during emergencies and educate them about the optimal timelines for completion of each activity. A disaster recovery plan template is a living and evolving document that should contain provisions for modifications and all employees must be encouraged to provide inputs about activities, improvisations and modifications to the list. Increased employee participations can not only lead to increase in employee awareness about the DRP; it can also lead to the overall improvement of DRP structure. This can also facilitate a smooth and error free implementation of the DRP whenever the need arises.

Client comfort and buy-in: Clients are the source of revenue for business entities and almost all the aspects of a business structure include activities that pertain to client interests. Client requirement will vary and a single DRP may not be sufficient to cover all the interests of all the clients. This is why it is important to have a disaster recovery plan template that is dynamic and has the ability to incorporate or eliminate activities in accordance to addition and deletion of clients and also include change in requirements of existing clients. It is important to have disaster recovery plan reviews with the clients on a regular basis and make the necessary changes to the overall plan whenever necessary.

Stakeholder satisfaction: Profits and revenue are the aspects that the stakeholders are interested in. Disaster recovery plan must be designed in such a way that the revenue impact during emergencies is eliminated or at least minimized. For cases with unavoidable loss in revenue, the DRP must also list out the reasons for impact and project losses wherever possible.