ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some newer concepts relating to business continuity and disaster recovery planning, such as the example about text messaging given earlier, and the need for cultural change away from the traditional planning. Most organizations have either a business continuity plan or a disaster recovery plan, or hopefully both since each should be unique. Recovery Time Objective is the maximum tolerable downtime or interruption in access to an information system that a department could handle before the impact would be unacceptable to either patient care or business operations. Recovery Point Objective is the potential loss of information due to the frequency of the backups. Financial funding and management backing are two of the primary challenges most often identified by business continuity planning professionals, especially as organizations struggle with economic hard times. Backups need to be periodically tested to verify that the backup process is working properly and prevent the possibility of unrecoverable data caused by corrupted media.
