It is important for accounting firms and clients to develop, maintain, and regularly test a disaster recovery plan to mitigate the losses due to a system failure. Disaster recovery planning requires a sizable investment of corporate labor and financial resources in the areas of procedure design, implementation and testing. The first step in creating a disaster recovery plan is to form a disaster recovery plan/crisis crisis management team, which will be responsible for creating and maintaining the plan, and managing it in the event of any business interruption. The team creates action plans and underlying documentation of procedures that mitigate each of the risks and then tests these plans and procedures in real time to the greatest extent possible. Companies need regular and secure off-site rotation and storage of data backup media, a mirrored Web site, and redundant communications configurations to forward telephones to an alternate location.

Disaster recovery
Contingency planning
Accounting firms