A workable disaster-recovery plan starts with the business services that must return—not with a data center or a replication product. Set an agreed recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for each service and its dependencies, choose a recovery design that can meet them during the hazards you face, protect the recovery copies, and test both failover and restoration.
1. Map business services and what they depend on
Begin with the services the organization needs to keep operating, then map the technology and people required to restore each one. A service may depend on applications and databases, but also on identity systems, DNS, networks, telecoms, cloud control planes, facilities, electricity, cooling, suppliers, and staff.
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Identify which services must recover together and the order in which they can come back. The Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) describes the public-service ICT directive as calling for business functions and supporting systems to be identified and prioritised, with recovery responsibilities assigned. Its scope is national and provincial departments, government components, and specified public-service contexts—not every South African organization.
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2. Agree recovery targets with business owners
Set targets per business service, with the relevant business owner—not just the data-center or infrastructure team. RTO is the target for how long service can be unavailable before it is restored. RPO is the maximum acceptable data loss, expressed as the time between the recovery point and the disruption. Document assumptions, the minimum service level required during recovery, and who accepts any degraded operation.
Check that the proposed targets are achievable with the available compute, storage, network capacity, software licences, staff, supplier support, and recovery procedures. A replication interval alone does not establish that a service can be brought back within its RTO.
| Workload tier | RTO | RPO |
|---|---|---|
| Business-critical | 1–3 hours | 15 minutes–1 hour |
| Business-important | 3–6 hours | 1–4 hours |
| Important/operational | 6–36 hours | 4–24 hours |
| Non-critical/archive | 36–72+ hours | 24–72+ hours |
These tiers are examples in a National Lotteries Commission (NLC) procurement carrying a 2026 identifier; its publication date was not confirmed in the inspected text. They are procurement assumptions, not national benchmarks. Separately, a National Development Agency (NDA) hosted-site tender published in January 2026 specifies an RTO of no more than two hours and an RPO of no more than 15 minutes for critical systems. That is the NDA’s requirement, not a general South African threshold.
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3. Choose a recovery design and location that match the hazards
There is no universal distance that makes a recovery site safe. Separation helps only when the second site avoids the relevant shared hazards and dependencies, while still providing the capacity and connectivity needed to restore the workload. Assess regional power disruption, network or carrier failure, cyberattack, facility loss, and supplier or control-plane outages against the actual design.
| Recovery option | What to assess |
|---|---|
| Second owned or colocation data center | Geographic and hazard separation; shared utilities and carriers; reserved capacity; staffing; hardware lifecycle; operating cost; and whether exercises can realistically use the site. |
| Cloud recovery or disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) | Local region and site details; workload compatibility; guaranteed recovery capacity; identity and network dependencies; data-location terms; security controls; service-level definitions; and exit and failback procedures. |
| Backup-led rebuild | Isolation and immutability of backups; restore throughput; clean-room capability; recovery of software and configuration; licences and keys; and whether a rebuild can meet the RTO. |
These are decision criteria, not a controlled comparison or vendor ranking. One NLC procurement requires its secondary cloud data center to be outside the municipality of its current center. That shows how a buyer can specify geographic separation in a tender; it does not establish a required distance for other organizations.
An NDA tender published in January 2026 seeks South Africa-hosted DRaaS and specifies local hosting, a minimum uptime SLA, encryption, near-real-time replication, immutability, and quarterly failover simulations. Those are that agency’s procurement specifications, not independent evidence that a provider will meet them. Verify recovery capacity, site details, service-level terms, and test evidence against your own requirements.
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Include facility power in the recovery design
For an owned or colocation site, assess power continuity against the actual load, runtime requirement, electrical design, and maintenance arrangements. A UPS can support facility continuity, but it does not by itself recover applications, data, networks, or people. Have qualified facilities engineers assess the site’s electrical design and backup-power arrangements.
4. Protect the recovery path and its data
Document backup frequency and retention, encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, separation of administrative credentials, off-site copies, monitoring, and the process for restoring service. Protect backup systems from the same failure domain they are meant to mitigate. Include the software versions, configurations, keys, credentials, and dependencies needed to make recovery copies usable.
Immutability should have a clear operational meaning: the NLC procurement defines it as preventing modification or deletion for a specified period. Decide what that period needs to be, who can administer the backup environment, and how alerts or access logs will be reviewed. A copy that exists but cannot be accessed, read, or trusted is not a usable recovery copy.
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5. Assign decision rights and communications
Name the incident commander, technical recovery leads, business service owners, security lead, communications contact, and supplier contacts. Write down who can declare a disaster, invoke failover, approve degraded service, and authorize failback. Maintain contact paths that do not depend solely on the site or systems that may have failed.
For the public-service contexts it covers, the DPSA account of the ICT directive describes an ICT Disaster Recovery Team, an agreed definition of an ICT disaster, backup procedures, prioritised business functions, and clear recovery roles. Other organizations can use these as planning considerations without treating the directive as automatically applicable to them.
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Test scenarios that reflect plausible failures, including loss of one facility, regional power disruption, network or carrier failure, ransomware or other cyberattack, corrupted data, and supplier or control-plane outage. Exercise the decision and communications process as well as the technical runbooks.
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A failover exercise checks whether service can move to the recovery environment. A separate backup restoration test checks whether data can actually be recovered and is accessible, readable, and intact. Replication to another site is not a substitute for either test.
| Example source | Specified exercise cadence |
|---|---|
| NLC procurement with a 2026 identifier; publication date not confirmed in the inspected text | Failover twice per year; backup and restoration tests quarterly. |
| NDA hosted-site tender, January 2026 | Quarterly failover simulations. |
| International Trade Administration Commission (ITAC) panel terms, 2026 | DR simulations twice per year; backup recovery tests quarterly, with documented results and recommendations. |
These are requirements in particular procurement documents, not a universal test frequency. Set your cadence according to applicable rules, contracts, risk, and organizational policy. After each exercise, record achieved RTO and RPO, data integrity, decision delays, missed dependencies, communication failures, costs, and corrective actions with named owners and due dates.
7. Plan failback and keep the plan current
Define how the organization will decide that the primary site is safe to use again, who authorizes the return, and how data created at the recovery site will be reconciled. Include integrity checks and a controlled sequence for restoring normal operations. The NLC procurement specifically describes returning operations to the primary production site after a disaster.
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Keep diagrams, inventories, runbooks, supplier contacts, and recovery credentials current. Revisit the plan after major architecture or supplier changes, acquisitions, incidents, and exercises so the documented recovery path continues to match the service.
What South African law and regulation do—and do not—establish
Legal and regulatory duties depend on sector, data, and the facts of the organization. The examples below should not be read as one nationwide DR specification for every data center.
Quick Recap
- Electronic Communications and Transactions Act: its critical-database provisions include disaster-recovery plans for loss of critical databases among matters to be addressed by regulations. That provision alone should not be presented as a complete DR standard for every business.
- Critical Infrastructure Protection Act 8 of 2019: the South African Government describes the Act as providing for the identification and declaration of critical infrastructure and measures for its protection, safeguarding, and resilience. Its summary says the purpose is “to provide for measures to be put in place for the protection, safeguarding and resilience of critical infrastructure”. Whether a facility is covered depends on the statutory process and the facts; a data center is not automatically declared critical infrastructure. The government page lists commencement of specified provisions on 30 April 2022.
- DPSA ICT Determination and Directive: the DPSA describes its public-service scope as national and provincial departments, government components, and specified public-service contexts, with an effective date of 29 November 2022. It is not automatically a private-sector requirement.
- Joint Standard 1 of 2026: the South African Reserve Bank Prudential Authority’s Joint Communication 3 of 2026, dated 28 April 2026, announces minimum recovery-plan requirements for market infrastructures. The Authority describes the standard as designed “to enable the market infrastructure to recover from such a threat while continuing to provide its critical services without requiring the use of resolution powers”. Its named scope is market infrastructures; financial entities should verify whether and how it applies to them.
- Data location and POPIA: public tenders request POPIA compliance, local hosting, or data-sovereignty provisions in particular contexts. Those terms establish the buyer’s requirement, not a blanket data-localization rule for all organizations. Assess the organization’s data, sector, contracts, and cross-border processing with appropriate legal advice.
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