Abstract
Higher education administrators and MIS managers recognize the need for contingency and disaster recovery plans. Unfortunately, the perceived cost and effort involved, together with day-to-day operational pressures, tend to relegate such planning to a lower priority - if it happens at all. McGill University questioned the need for expensive, high tech solutions and instead focused on risk assessment and risk avoidance for central as well as distributed and departmental systems - based on the theory that prevention is better than cure.