ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the process of business recovery planning specifically for local area networks (LANs) and the components that comprise the LAN. In the distributed environments, information technology personnel are often asked to develop systems recovery plans outside the context of an overall business recovery scheme. The success of business continuity planning rests on a company’s ability to integrate systems recovery in the greater overall planning effort. Distinctive areas must be addressed in the formulation of a company’s disaster recovery plan, and attention to these areas should follow the steps of the scientific method: a statement of the problem, the development of a hypothesis, and the testing of the hypothesis. The phases of a disaster recovery plan process are: awareness and discovery, risk assessment, mitigation, preparation, testing, and response and recovery. Awareness begins when a recovery planning team can identify both possible threats and plausible threats to business operations.
