Incident Response vs Disaster Recovery: Two Playbooks That Must Talk (2025 Guide)

Incident Response (IR) stops the bleeding; Disaster Recovery (DR) stitches the wound. Treat them as one continuum and you’ll contain attacks faster and bounce back cheaper—especially with 2025’s tighter NIST‑driven mandates.

Quick Definitions

  • • Incident Response (IR) – The structured approach to detect, contain, and eradicate security incidents, aiming to minimise impact and gather learnings.
  • • Disaster Recovery (DR) – The strategies and processes that restore IT services and data after a major disruption—cyber‑attack, hardware failure, natural disaster.

Think of IR as the “fire‑fighting brigade” and DR as the “rebuild crew.” Both wear the same badge—business continuity.

Why Both Matter in 2025

Remote work, ransomware‑as‑a‑service, and stricter disclosure laws mean time‑to‑contain and time‑to‑recover now sit on quarterly board slides. Without a clear hand‑off between IR and DR, organisations risk:

  • • Longer downtime — containment delays recovery start.
  • • Higher breach costs — lost data + lost service revenue.
  • • Regulatory fines — SEC, DORA, and NIS2 impose tight reporting and uptime rules.

IR vs DR at a Glance

Aspect
Incident Response
Disaster Recovery

Goal

Stop & investigate incident

Restore services & data

Focus

Security breach, malware, insider threat

Any disruption (cyber, power, flood)

Time‑horizon

Minutes to hours

Hours to days

Owner

SOC / SecOps

IT Ops / BCDR team

Standards

NIST SP 800‑61r2, ISO 27035

ISO 22301, NIST SP 800‑34

KPIs

MTTD, MTTC, MTTR(I)

RPO, RTO

Framework Alignment (NIST, ISO, DORA)

  • • NIST CSF v2.0 (2024) — maps “Respond” and “Recover” functions side by side, encouraging shared tooling.
  • • NIST SP 800‑61r2 — details IR phases (prepare, detect, analyse, contain, eradicate, recover). The recover phase dovetails into DR runbooks.
  • • NIST SP 800‑34r1 — focuses on IT contingency planning, providing DR guidance that picks up post‑containment.
  • • ISO 27001 / 22301 — security and continuity standards that overlap in clauses on incident handling and recovery.
  • • EU DORA (2025 enforcement) — requires financial entities to prove both IR and DR, plus show linkages.

Use framework cross‑walks to ensure your IR and DR docs reference each other, minimizing audit friction.

Metrics, Testing & Continuous Improvement

Phase
Key Metric
Target

Detect

MTTD (Mean Time to Detect)

< 5 min for critical alerts

Contain

MTTC (Mean Time to Contain)

< 30 min post‑detection

Recover

RTO (Recovery Time Objective)

< 60 min for Tier 0 workloads

Validate

Data Integrity Error Rate

0 % in quarterly tests

Run bi‑annual joint tabletop drills: IR handles simulated breach; once contained, DR restores to sandbox; both teams score performance and update SOPs.

Start today!

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Incident Response and Disaster Recovery are two halves of the same resilience coin. When their playbooks sync, attacks get contained faster, outages shorten, and audit time shrinks. In 2025, frameworks like NIST CSF v2.0 and DORA make that integration a compliance must‑have.

 

Ready to unify IR and DR playbooks? Start a free 7‑day Sefthy trial and test a full containment‑to‑recovery drill today.

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