Preparing for Design › Preparing a Contingency Plan

Preparing a Contingency Plan

Integrity controls can never be completely effective. Even if it were possible to identify every potential risk, the cost of securing against all of them would probably be prohibitive. For this reason, you must establish a contingency plan, which is a set of provisions for events that interrupt or destroy information processing capability.

Contingency handling should be designed into the system. It is too late to start contingency planning when things begin to go wrong.

A contingency plan should contain the procedures listed in the following:

• Fallback—Allows business activities to continue while the normal computer system is unavailable.
• Back-up—Devised to take regular copies of data and transactions to be used in case of loss or corruption of the database.
• Recovery—Can be performed to enable a return to using routine computing procedures after a failure. This may involve:
  • Roll back—The reversal of changes made by the current transaction
  • Restore—The resetting of stored data to the state immediately following the most recent back-up
  • Roll forward—The rerun of the current transaction after a roll back