A disaster recovery plan is a grouping of policies and procedures for how an organization responds and recovers from an event that negatively affects business operations. This plan should provide business continuity for essential infrastructure following a natural or human-induced disaster.

If an infrastructure is designed to provide high availability, then it may not achieve the goal of disaster recovery. A system that is considered highly available is fault tolerant, which is usually accomplished with redundancy. If a component in the system fails, it can seamlessly and automatically switch (failover) to a secondary backup. Disaster recovery aims to have an alternate site up and running when the primary site is offline due to an unforeseen event. A solution with both high availability and disaster recovery is crucial for business continuity if there is a component failure or disaster.