Levels of assurance in Disaster Recovery Plan

There is a propensity for the leader of every business unit to have an inflated sense of the criticality of the systems, services and contribution of their area. In order to sort out the priorities it is necessary to determine a level of assurance that is appropriate. An organized, defined set of assurance levels can be developed in terms of the following five standards, with a rough correspondence to maximum tolerable outages:

1. Platinum (five stars) – maximum tolerable outage less than hours;
2. Gold (four stars) – maximum tolerable outage up to one day;
3. Silver (three stars) – maximum tolerable outage up to one week;
4. Bronze (two stars) – maximum tolerable outage up to one month;
5. No standard – no defined tolerable outage.