Optical networks require a number of security and survivability methods as any other network does. These methods are more important for a WDM network since it carries far greater amount of data than any other network. In the multilayer networking approach, protection mechanism is more technical compared to the nonlayered network. To attain high performance and quick recovery, a well-considered coordination between different layers is mandatory. This paper provides an overview of multilayer recovery issues for WDM optical network and also focuses on how these techniques can be applied to make the next generation WDM networks more fault tolerant and survivable.