Chapter 10. Disaster Recovery and Data Integrity

A disaster-recovery plan looks at what disasters could hit the company and lays out a plan for responding to those disasters. Disaster-recovery planning includes implementing ways to mitigate potential disasters and making preparations to enable quick restoration of key services. The plan identifies what those key services are and specifies how quickly they need to be restored.

All sites need to do some level of disaster-recovery (DR) planning. DR planners must consider what happens if something catastrophic occurs at any one of their organization’s sites and how they can recover from it. We concentrate on the electronic data aspects of DR. However, this part of the plan should be built as part of a larger program in order to meet the company’s legal and financial obligations. Several books are dedicated to disaster-recovery planning, and we recommend them for further reading: Fulmer (2000), Levitt (1997), and Schreider (1998).