Disaster recovery is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster.

Disasters can result from events such as

  • hacker attacks
  • computer viruses
  • electric power failures
  • underground cable cuts or failures
  • fire, flood, earthquake, and other natural disasters at a facility
  • mistakes in system administration

An IT disaster recovery plan takes into account the need to

  • detect the outages or other disaster effects as quickly as possible
  • notify any affected parties so that they can take action
  • isolate the affected systems so that damage cannot spread
  • repair the critical affected systems so that operations can be resumed