What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is a growing IT engineering practice that includes all technologies related to recovery and protection of electronic data. Disaster recovery focuses on the IT or technology systems supporting critical business functions. Disaster recovery developed in the mid- to late 1970s as computer center managers began to recognize the dependence of their organizations on their computer systems. At that time, most systems were batch-oriented mainframes which in many cases could be down for a number of days before significant damage would be done to the organization. As IT adoption grew in the following years, the disaster recovery industry developed to provide backup computer data centers.

With the rapid growth of the Internet organizations of all sizes became further dependent on the continuous availability of their IT systems. This increasing dependence on IT systems, as well as increased awareness from large-scale disasters such as tsunami, earthquake, flood, and volcanic eruption, spawned disaster recovery-related products and services, ranging from high-availability solutions to hot-site facilities further led to the growth of Disaster Recovery Industry.