A critical assessment of information technology disaster recovery strategies in Ghanaian banks

Abstract

Banks were among the earliest adopters of information technology in the business world. In any business organisation, customer data and other corporate information form a critical and valuable asset of the organisation. Disaster recovery planning protects data against loss. The focus of the research was to investigate the disaster recovery strategies and plans being used by the banking industry in Ghana and the preparedness of the banks' staff for recovery from information technology disaster. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research approaches with the simple random sampling technique, the results showed that banks in Ghana are basically ill-prepared for Information technology (IT) disasters, a premise on which a number of recommendations are made to improve the situation. It needs to be emphasized that the results may not be suitable for generalization since only seven out of thirty banks were researched.