What should be included in a disaster recovery plan for a data center?

A comprehensive disaster recovery plan for a data center must encompass multiple facets that ensure a thorough approach to mitigating risks and facilitating recovery after an incident. Including a risk assessment and recovery strategies is vital as they lay the groundwork for understanding potential threats and vulnerabilities that the data center might face.

Risk assessment helps identify various types of risks—such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, hardware failures, and human errors. This analysis guides the development of tailored recovery strategies that are essential for restoring operations efficiently and effectively. Recovery strategies outline specific actions, personnel responsibilities, resource allocation, and timelines to get the data center back to a functional state after an incident, ensuring minimal downtime and data loss.

The other choices do not encompass the complete approach needed for a disaster recovery plan. Data backup procedures are critical but are only one component among several necessary for an effective recovery strategy. A timeline for building expansion is related to future planning but does not directly pertain to disaster recovery. General employee training methods, while important for preparedness, are not comprehensive enough on their own to form the backbone of a disaster recovery plan. Thus, emphasizing risk assessment and recovery strategies provides a structured and practical framework for effectively managing disaster recovery in a data center setting.