This form of assessment evaluates a system’s ability to resume operations after experiencing failures, errors, or hardware malfunctions. For instance, a database server might be subjected to a sudden power outage, and the effectiveness with which it restarts and restores data integrity is then analyzed.
Its importance lies in ensuring system reliability and data preservation, which is vital for business continuity and user trust. Historically, as systems became more complex and critical to daily operations, the need to rigorously evaluate their ability to recover from unexpected disruptions became increasingly evident.