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CONTINGENCY PLANNING

The key elements of a contingency plan are “protection, detection, and recoverability.”

A contingency plan acknowledges that disaster can happen: the organization must design a plan to accommodate the survival of organizational operations in the event of a flood, fire, earthquake, electrical disturbance, or other unexpected events that can disrupt the organization’s systems. Risk analysis should offer guidance on the likelihood of various contingencies, and in what resources to invest providing such recovery methods as off-site systems, backups, and so on. Several references discuss contingency planning.

Every effective contingency plan must consider backing up data files.

Most critical to the firm is that a contingency plan:

  • exists;
  • is communicated to employees; and
  • is tested regularly.