The first step in any disaster recovery effort is ensuring the safety of all people involved. Before restoring systems, salvaging equipment, or assessing damage, every person on the team must be accounted for and protected from immediate hazards. Once human safety is confirmed, the operational first step is activating your notification chain to alert the right people that recovery has begun.
These two actions, protecting people and sounding the alarm, set everything else in motion. What follows is a structured sequence that moves from assessment to restoration, and understanding that sequence helps whether you’re recovering from a hurricane, a cyberattack, or a server room flood.
Safety Comes Before Everything Else
No recovery task should begin until the physical environment is safe for the people doing the work. OSHA guidelines for disaster recovery require a hazard assessment at every work site before anyone enters. That means checking for structural instability, electrical dangers, chemical exposure, and any condition that could injure recovery personnel. A competent person must evaluate building stability before anyone goes inside.
Every recovery team needs a designated leader who is present and supervising at all times. Teams should carry a working phone along with emergency contact numbers, plus maps or GPS so they can communicate their exact location to first responders if something goes wrong. The team leader checks in with a central base at set intervals throughout the day.
For IT-focused disasters where the physical danger is less obvious, safety still applies. A flooded data center may have live electrical currents. A fire-damaged office may have compromised air quality. The principle is the same: confirm that people are safe, then move to the next step.
Activate the Notification Chain
Once safety is established, the formal first step in a disaster recovery plan is notifying the right people in the right order. A disaster recovery plan from the University of Southern California states it plainly: “The first step following activation of the IT DRP is notification of appropriate business and system support personnel.”
This notification sequence is defined in advance and typically flows like this:
- System owner or senior decision-maker: the person who authorizes recovery spending and priorities
- Technical point of contact: the person who understands the affected systems
- Business continuity coordinator: the person who manages the overall recovery plan
- Department and recovery team leads: the people who will do the hands-on restoration work
Notifications go out through whatever channels still function: mobile phones, email, automated alert systems, or even in-person runners if digital communication is down. The key is that this sequence is documented before a disaster happens. During a crisis is the worst time to figure out who to call.
Appoint an Incident Commander
Every disaster recovery effort needs a single person in charge. In the Incident Command System, this role is called the Incident Commander. This is the only position that must always be filled, regardless of the disaster’s size. Even a minor incident requires someone making decisions and directing resources.
The Incident Commander sets objectives, chooses strategies, and directs the overall response. For larger events, they may delegate to a broader team that includes a Safety Officer (monitoring hazards for responders), a Public Information Officer (communicating with stakeholders and media), a Liaison Officer (coordinating with outside agencies), and specialized teams for operations, planning, logistics, and finance. But the chain of command starts with one person who owns the recovery effort from minute one.
Assess the Damage
With leadership in place, the next priority is understanding what you’re dealing with. A damage assessment tells you what’s broken, what’s intact, and what you need to recover first. FEMA’s preliminary damage assessment framework captures location, category of damage, ownership and insurance details, cost estimates, and broader community impact, all using standardized fields and GIS technology so different agencies can share information consistently.
For IT disasters, this means determining which servers, applications, databases, and network connections are affected. For physical disasters, it means evaluating buildings, equipment, and infrastructure. The goal is a clear picture of the gap between where you are and where you need to be.
Document everything from the start. Photographs, timestamps, written descriptions of damage, and inventories of affected assets all serve double duty: they guide your recovery priorities and support insurance claims later.
Prioritize What Gets Restored First
Not everything can come back online at the same time, so you need a way to decide what matters most. This is where a business impact analysis pays off. Organizations that have done this work before a disaster already know which functions are mission-essential, how long each can be down before causing serious harm, and what resources each one needs to restart.
Three metrics drive these decisions:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): the maximum time a system or process can stay down before the impact becomes unacceptable
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): the maximum amount of data loss you can tolerate, measured in time since the last backup
- Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD): the absolute ceiling for how long a business function can be degraded or offline
These numbers vary dramatically by industry. Financial services firms typically set RTOs measured in seconds. Healthcare organizations aim for 5 to 15 minutes. Retail businesses generally target 2 to 8 hours, while manufacturing operations may tolerate 4 to 24 hours. Your industry and the specific function dictate how aggressively you need to restore each piece.
Recovery teams use these priorities to sequence their work, restoring the most time-sensitive systems first and working down the list. Each system’s dependencies matter too. A critical application is useless if the network it runs on hasn’t been restored yet, so the recovery order accounts for these interdependencies.
Why Pre-Planning Determines Success
Every step described above works best when it was designed before the disaster, not improvised during it. The notification chain, the incident command structure, the damage assessment checklist, the prioritized recovery sequence: all of these should exist as documented plans that your team has rehearsed.
Organizations that skip the business impact analysis find themselves in the worst possible position during a crisis, arguing about what to fix first while the clock runs. Those that haven’t defined their notification chain waste critical early minutes trying to reach people through ad hoc methods. The first step in disaster recovery is really two things at once: the immediate action you take when disaster strikes (confirm safety, notify your team) and the planning you did months or years earlier that makes those actions fast and effective.
If you’re building a disaster recovery plan from scratch, start with the business impact analysis. Identify your essential functions, assign RTOs and RPOs, map out dependencies, and document the recovery sequence. Then build your notification procedures, assign your incident command roles, and run a tabletop exercise so everyone knows what to do before the pressure is real.