DR is short for disaster recovery. Disaster recovery is the technologies backed by policies and procedures which are designed to bring technology back to its stable state.

Storage giant EMC lists disaster recovery as who chooses disaster recovery, and why.

Organizations protect against outages or information loss as a form of insurance. The cost of outages or data loss can be measured in monetary terms or as intangibles such as health and safety, market share, or reputation. Each organization has a unique risk tolerance, and it’s common for different applications to have different requirements for RTO and RPO.