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Disaster Recovery Paper

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Disaster Recovery
A disaster is “an occurrence that disrupts the functioning of the organization resulting in loss of data, loss of personnel, loss of business or loss of time” (Hiatt, 2010, P.4). There are four broad categories of disasters. According to Hiatt (2010), disaster occurs as a result of accidents, internal factors such as sabotage, natural disasters like earthquake and armed conflict such as war or terrorism (Hiatt, 2010). In each of these categories, the goal is to mitigate the impact and quickly recover from the disaster. In other to do that effectively, the organizations should put a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan in place before the actual disaster occurs. The DR plan, which is usually embedded in most organization’ business continuity …show more content…

In other words, it is the “process that you can use to help recover information systems and data, if a disaster occurs” (Microsoft, 2015). There are two general concepts or sections of DR plan (Snedater, 2007). One section is “devoted to the technology needs of the company during an emergency” and the other section delineates, in case of a disaster, the “initial steps needed to restore all affected IT systems, including business applications, servers, network infrastructure, and computer facilities to normal operations” (Snedater, 2007). And as most healthcare facilities and nurses rely more and more on technology to carry out patient’s care, disaster recovery become a critical but daunting task to healthcare facilities. Rector (2012), recognized this challenge, and stated “disasters can put healthcare institutions in the daunting position of needing to treat patients and simultaneously preserve at-risk data that may be necessary to …show more content…

In all the steps, the goal is to achieve business continuity, technology infrastructure protection and protection of critical business data from permanent destruction or unauthorized breach (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2012b). By planning for disaster ahead of time, the FEMA noted that companies ensure they minimize downtime and reduce costs in the event of an actual disaster. For nursing care, DR plan reduces turn-around time and minimize disruption of patients care and other hospital business during a disaster. Disaster recovery plan also warrants patients’ and hospital critical data are backed-up, accessible through remote sites, and make patient’ data available even at the time of disaster. Examples of disaster recovery solutions are; Failover clustering, Database mirroring, Peer-to-peer transactional replication, Backup & Restore Feature and Redundant Array of Independent Disks, RAID, (Microsoft). Selection of the appropriate disaster recovery strategy depends on each business requirements of the organization (Microsoft

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