There tends to be a fair amount of confusion regarding what Disaster Recovery is all about, what areas of risk it covers and why it's so important to mitigate risk by having a disaster recovery plan. In this introduction we provide a definition for Disaster Recovery Planning, we look at why DR is becoming a more visible business priority and we discuss the terms used to refer to disaster recovery planning and the scope of different plans.

In the previous tutorials, you should have determined the Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for critical business processes and mapped those to various parts of your IT infrastructure. In this chapter we'll review the primary disaster recovery strategies that may be appropriate based on your objectives and budget.

This article can be used to provide your end users with an overview of what Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity is and to give them a better understanding of why it is important.