What aspect of the disaster recovery (DR) plan ensures control when issues exceed capabilities?

The aspect of the disaster recovery plan that ensures control when issues exceed capabilities is handling provider outages. This element is crucial because service provider outages can significantly impact business operations, especially in a cloud environment. A disaster recovery plan must account for the potential of an external provider experiencing downtime or service disruption.

By addressing provider outages in the disaster recovery strategy, organizations can outline procedures for maintaining operations despite third-party failures. This may include identifying alternate service providers, establishing service level agreements (SLAs) that define provider responsibilities during outages, and creating a communication plan to inform stakeholders about the situation. In essence, this aspect of the DR plan enables an organization to maintain business continuity and minimize disruption when faced with issues beyond their direct control.

The other options, while relevant to the overall strategy of disaster recovery, do not specifically focus on maintaining control in the face of external challenges. Ensuring data backups, evaluating portability alternatives, and managing plane controls are all important components of a disaster recovery plan but do not directly address the situation where an organization's capabilities might be exceeded due to issues such as provider outages.