Recovery or Disaster Recovery

The act of restoring regular business operations as quickly as possible after a natural or man-made disaster. Typically, a set of preventive measures is put in place to ensure that the restoration can be performed in a timely fashion. Redundant (duplicate) hardware, software, data centers, and other facilities are used as standby and backup facilities to which operations can be switched over when the primary ones are wiped out. A number of organizations that were hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 found that their backups and backup systems were not far enough removed from their normal sites of operation; they, therefore, suffered destruction of these backups as well.