What type of mitigation provision is utilized when redundant communications links are

damage to your business, on both a short-term and long-term basis. Your business continuity and disaster recovery plans should include adequate preventative measures to control the fre- quency of these occurrences as well as contingency plans to mitigate the effects theft and van- dalism have on your ongoing operations. Keep the impact that theft may have on your operations in mind when planning your parts inventory. It would be a good idea to keep an extra inventory of items with a high pilferage rate, such as RAM chips and laptops. Recovery Strategy When a disaster interrupts your business, your disaster recovery plan should be able to kick in nearly automatically and begin providing support to recovery operations. The disaster recovery plan should be designed in such a manner that the first employees on the scene can immediately begin the recovery effort in an organized fashion, even if members of the official DRP team have not yet arrived on site. In the following sections, we’ll examine the critical subtasks involved in crafting an effective disaster recovery plan that will guide the rapid restoration of normal busi- ness processes and the resumption of activity at the primary business location. In addition to improving your response capabilities, purchasing insurance can reduce risk of financial losses. When selecting insurance, be sure to purchase sufficient coverage to enable you to recover from a disaster. Simple value coverage may be insufficient to encompass actual replacement costs. If your property insurance includes an Actual Cost Evaluation ACV clause, then your damaged property will be compensated based on the value of the items on the date of loss plus 10 percent. Valuable paper insurance coverage provides protection for inscribed, printed, and written documents and manuscripts and other printed business records. However, it does not cover damage to paper money and printed security certificates. Business Unit Priorities In order to recover your business operations with the greatest possible efficiency, you must engi- neer your disaster recovery plan so that the business units with the highest priority are recovered first. To achieve this goal, the DRP team must first identify those business units and agree on an order of prioritization. If this process sounds familiar, it should This is very similar to the prioritization task the BCP team performed during the Business Impact Assessment, discussed in the previous chapter. In fact, if you have a completed BIA, you should use the resulting doc- umentation as the basis for this prioritization task. As a minimum requirement, the output from this task should be a simple listing of busi- ness units in prioritized order. However, a much more useful deliverable would be a more detailed list broken down into specific business processes listed in order of priority. This