Was it really a disaster after all? It's important to distinguish operational recovery from disaster recovery because the tools and techniques used in each situation can differ significantly.

The only real solution is to get running normally as quickly as possible. But many disaster recovery products, especially storage replication technologies, lack the ability to "fail back" after a disaster-induced "failover," so check with your vendors to ensure that their products handle disaster fail back satisfactorily. And, of course, you must have somewhere to fail back to, whether you return to normal operations at the original location or a new one.

Disaster recovery is complex. It's essential to recognize your real capabilities, but it's also important to extract honesty from the rest of the business. When will we consider a mere failure to have escalated to the level of a real disaster? And what diminished expectations would accompany an honest site-wide disaster as opposed to a simple operational failure? By answering these questions, your plan will progress more rapidly than it would by concentrating on technical solutions alone.