ICT Response and Recovery Plan

Overview

An ICT response and recovery plan is a documented set of roles, decisions, procedures, communications, and technical actions for containing technology incidents and restoring critical services.

ICT Response and Recovery Plan is closely connected to ICT-Related Incident, Major ICT-Related Incident, and Recovery Control. Under financial-sector resilience frameworks it is not merely a disaster recovery document; it should connect incident management, business continuity, recovery priorities, dependencies, testing, and regulatory reporting.

Operational implementation should define activation criteria, command roles, service priorities, recovery objectives, alternate communications, backup restoration, third-party coordination, evidence preservation, customer messaging, and testing schedules.

The principal failure modes include unclear authority, outdated contact lists, untested backups, dependency blind spots, conflicting runbooks, missed notifications, and recovery actions that reintroduce the compromise.

Useful measures include exercise completion, recovery objective achievement, restoration time, plan exceptions, dependency coverage, and lessons closed after testing or incidents.

Operationally, teams should define activation criteria, command roles, service priorities, and recovery objectives. Key risks include unclear authority, outdated contact lists, untested backups, and dependency blind spots.

A production treatment of ICT Response and Recovery Plan should test a documented set of roles, decisions, procedures, communications, and technical actions for containing technology incidents and restoring critical services within the relevant asset, decision, or service state. The ICT Response and context record for documented set of roles, decisions, and procedures should preserve source data, configuration or policy version, responsible actor, exception, and outcome. Review of ICT Response and Recovery Plan should determine whether safeguards addressing documented set of roles, decisions, and procedures changed exposure in practice, not merely whether a document or setting existed.