As modern organizations grow more dependent on computerized systems and other technologies, it becomes increasingly important that management develop disaster recovery and business continuation programs that minimize damaging disruptions as well as the costs of doing so. Kenneth Myers, one of the world's foremost innovators in the field of contingency planning, now provides you with a time-tested, copyrighted plan development process that you can readily adapt to your own organization to ensure business continuity and cost savings. While other books offer contingency solutions that are difficult to understand and even more costly to implement, Total Contingency Planning for Disasters presents an unusually clear, step-by-step model for developing, testing, and maintaining a cost-effective, long-range strategic plan that can stand up to natural, environmental, and man-made disasters - as well as the scrutiny of auditors. Myers lays the foundation by prompting you to take a good, hard look at your present recovery strategy and consider how well it protects specific business units, how effective it would be in minimizing disruptions in the face of potential disasters and how much it costs. What you'll doubtless discover is that your present plan is only a computer recovery plan that fails to account for other areas of exposure, including telephone communications and vital facilities. What's more, you'll learn that your existing plan overlooks cost-reduction opportunities, that there is a lot of uncertainty about what systems are really critical, and that your plan was probably put together by people other than those who are ultimately going to carry it out. Your next step is to turn to theMyers process, which considers the possible disasters that could befall you and their impact on all the vital aspects of your business - not just computer processing. This book helps you lay out plan objectives, including prevention, safeguarding assets, business continuity, and maintaining market share in the event of a disaster. You'll come to understand what qualities an effective plan must have from flexibility and cost-effectiveness to maintainability and testability. Even more important, you'll learn to gain crucial functional managers support for the plan, without which it simply can't survive. In a highly competitive world where normal, day-to-day battles in the marketplace are tough enough, it's important for you to be ready to deal with major setbacks that could suddenly jeopardize the financial health of your organization. Total Contingency Planning for Disasters is the one time-tested approach that helps you do just that, providing you with a network of practical contingency solutions that will keep your business going while keeping your costs down.