Backup and Disaster Recovery Policy

1. Purpose

This policy establishes the requirements and responsibilities for ensuring data integrity, availability, and rapid recovery in the event of a disaster or data loss in cloud environments. It supports SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria (Availability, Confidentiality) and aligns with ISO/IEC 27001 requirements on Business Continuity, Operations Security, and Compliance.

2. Scope

This policy applies to:

• All systems, applications, and infrastructure hosted in cloud environments (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) that store, process, or transmit organizational or customer data.
• All employees, internal teams, vendors, and third parties who have roles or responsibilities related to backup, storage, recovery, or failover procedures.

3. Policy Statements

3.1 Backup Requirements

• Data Coverage: All production databases, configuration files, logs, and business-critical assets must be backed up.

• Frequency:

  • Databases: Incremental backups daily; full backups weekly.

  • File Storage: Nightly incremental backups with weekly full backups.

  • System Images: Weekly or as dictated by infrastructure changes.

• Storage Location:

  • Backups must be stored across geographically separate zones, regions, or cloud availability domains

  • At least one copy must be maintained offline, immutable or air-gapped.

• Retention:

  • Critical data: Minimum 90 days.

  • System logs: As per retention requirements outlined in the Data Retention Policy.

• Encryption:

  • All backups must be encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2 or higher) and at rest (AES-256 or equivalent).

• Access Control:

  • Backup systems must enforce least privilege access, audit logging, and MFA.

3.2 Disaster Recovery (DR) Requirements

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO):

  • Critical systems: ≤ 4 hours

  • Non-critical systems: ≤ 24 hours

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO):

  • Critical data: ≤ 1 hour

  • Non-critical data: ≤ 24 hours

• DR Strategy:

• Maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates to rapidly provision replacement environments
• Use automated failover and high-availability mechanisms supported by the cloud platform
• Conduct regular testing of DR strategies through tabletop exercises and live simulations

• Communication Plan:

  • The DR plan must include predefined roles, escalation paths, and external communication templates.

  • Notify stakeholders within 4 hours of a significant disruption.

3.3 Monitoring and Testing

• Monitoring:

  • Backup jobs must be continuously monitored for success/failure.

  • Alerts must be generated for incomplete or failed jobs.

• Testing:

  • Backup restoration tests must be performed:

    • Quarterly for mission-critical systems

    • Semi-annually for other systems

  • DR plans must be tested at least annually, with results documented and reviewed by the compliance team.

3.4 Roles and Responsibilities

• Engineering Team:

  • Configure and monitor backups.

  • Maintain IaC and automation scripts for DR.

• Compliance Officer / GRC Team:

  • Ensure alignment with SOC 2, ISO 27001, and regulatory frameworks

  • Coordinate periodic DR drills and maintain documentation.

• DevOps / Infrastructure Team:

  • Ensure high availability architecture and regional failover capabilities.

  • Manage secure storage of backup artefacts.

4. Exceptions

Any deviation from this policy must be documented, risk-assessed, and approved by the Information Security Team.

5. Policy Review

This policy must be reviewed annually or after any major infrastructure, compliance, or business continuity change.