Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery: Protecting Your Organization's Resources

As organizations implement a greater number of mission-critical applications over distributed networks, they become more vulnerable to potential disasters. CTR's 229-page report explores guidelines for developing successful contingency and disaster recovery strategies that will protect company resources and minimize downtime.

Disaster Recovery: An Overview

In today's distributed computing environments, organizations are more vulnerable than ever to the possibility of technical difficulties impeding communications.

Any disaster, from floods and fires to Internet viruses and espionage, can affect the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of critical business resources and leave an organization virtually inoperative.

CTR's new report, Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery: Protecting Your Organization's Resources, explores the computer-related risks facing organizations today and offers the latest in disaster recovery strategies, technologies, and tested contingency plans.

Disaster Recovery Issues and Concerns

Disaster recovery has taken on a new sense of urgency in recent years due to the expanding role of computers in the organization and the increasing occurrence of various types of disasters.

CTR's new report covers critical disaster recovery issues, including the following: hot, warm, and cold sites; dual data centers; disaster insurance; business impact analyses; and legal liabilities.

The report addresses the most current concerns regarding the security and protection of local area networks (LANs), the mainframe, and client/server (C/S) systems.

The report also includes a discussion of the available backup options and reviews tape management, direct access storage device (DASD) management, new backup paradigms, scalability and administration methods.

Internet Security Issues

Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery: Protecting Your Organization's Resources provides an in-depth examination of Internet and Web security issues. Understanding the risks of connecting to the Internet and learning how to minimize those risks is imperative to building a secure environment which enables information systems (IS) managers to use this technology.

The security risks of an Internet connection include the following: Internet protocol (IP) spoofing, session hijacking, password theft, denial of service attacks, and viruses.

The report also addresses Web security issues and offers valuable guidelines and a list of resources to help ensure the security of electronic transmissions.

Developing, Testing, and Implementing a Contingency Plan

Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery: Protecting Your Organization's Resources outlines practical disaster recovery goals and explains how to best meet these goals through a step-by-step plan. The report includes a discussion of who should be involved in the planning and why it is essential to identify and prioritize critical business applications and information.

Testing the disaster recovery plan and the benefits of feedback, "mock" tests, creative testing, and testing tools, are also covered in the report.

As the computing environment becomes more complex, and as computing becomes more distributed, IS managers must take preventive, precautionary, and preparatory measures to avoid a complete shutdown, should a disaster occur. This new CTR report is a valuable resource for IS managers responsible for these tasks.