What is the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity planning

Business continuity is a way of temporarily addressing the disruption until the issue can be fixed. In the event of a disruption, to ensure that your organization can continue to operate, you need to undertake business continuity planning exercise. As an example, say your office experiences flooding. A business continuity plan BCP details the actions, processes, and responsibilities required to secure your essential assets, continue your critical business processes, and ensure staff still have somewhere to work from.

Such steps may include the setting up of a temporary office or arranging for your employees to work from home. Business continuity plans usually focus on business applications and online systems, network and telecommunications services, and network and server access. Business continuity planning starts with a risk assessment, and business impact analysis BIA to determine the scope of the plan, regulatory, and legal obligations.

These first two steps form the foundation of the BCP, allowing you to gauge the risk and impact of any potential disruption to your business. A business continuity plan must have an alternative to maintain customer service in case of disruption. These alternatives can include data backup, emergency office locations, and emergency IT administrative rights. Moreover, the BCP must outline clear risk management strategies and set clear objectives for measuring success.

The process of dealing with interruptions in business operations due to natural disasters, power outages, and human errors is called disaster recovery DR. DR focuses on the immediate mitigation of any damage caused by a disaster.

When it comes to business continuity vs disaster recovery, disaster recovery is the process of resolving a disruption by identifying the incident source and applying a way to fix it. As such, most disaster recovery plans DRP focus on specific deadlines that must be met, and are very technical to prevent significant damage in the event of a catastrophic incident.

Disaster recovery plans will include RTOs recovery time objectives , which state how soon a product, service or activity must become available following an incident.

The failure to meet the RTO will result in the levels of disruption escalating. In the previous example of a flood: your business should address any likelihood that your computer systems may become water-damaged.

As such, you may mitigate this by restoring your systems from a backup to new computer hardware. The RTO will be duration it takes to restore the data to new hardware, which could be from a couple of hours, to up to a few days or weeks. In this scenario, your business will need to find a way to continue to operate without its systems for the duration of the RTO, i.

There will likely be other issues too, such as addressing the cause and any broader damage. Business continuity plans are determined according to the estimated recovery time. BCP is no longer in operation once the business can return to its original setup, having fixed every part of the organization that is impacted. When it comes to business continuity vs disaster recovery, the key difference between business continuity and disaster recovery is when the action plan takes effect.

For example, would you concentrate on active customers only? What are your priorities for supply and warehouse management? For example, financial enterprises must have a business continuity plan. Those resources support your most essential functions. They include any support equipment, software, and stock required to move forward. You manage that stock by keeping your inventory current.

You rotate consumable supplies through your emergency stock. Moreover, you have identified your key staff people. They know what they must do and when they must do it. For every job there is to do, someone must be designated to do it. So, the plan has to include practice and update of the plan as necessary. The plan must also focus on customers and the supply chain.

Suppliers must know that their payment invoices are in the pipeline and ready for payment. Customers must be confident that their orders will be filled or only temporarily delayed, perhaps with a discount premium. Finally, your BC plan must include a process to replace and recover your IT systems. That contains valuable business data. For example, is your network designed for data backup and recovery?

Failover is where a secondary system kicks in when the first one goes down. How much will it cost you to replace storm-ruined hardware? Disaster recovery is a subspace of total business continuity planning.

The primary stakeholders involved with business continuity include the business continuity planning team, employees, customers, vendors, and partners. Key stakeholders involved in disaster recovery include the disaster recovery team, customers, employees, and critical vendors and partners.

The well-being of stakeholders should be the top priority whenever an organization is faced with a crisis. Although there are differences between business continuity and disaster recovery, one of the overall keys to success for both strategies is the emphasis on effective communication. Your teams should have a plan in place for sharing relevant information with your stakeholders throughout a crisis. Using a platform built for these types of scenarios can make it easier for your organization to send alerts and notifications.

Business continuity is a strategy for maintaining critical business functions in the face of crisis, and disaster recovery is a key factor in restoring those business functions to full strength. Skip to content Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery. Share this article:. For instance, if your organization is facing a public relations crisis, you need to get out in front of it by communicating statements to both internal and external stakeholders.

Of course, your BC and DR plans often overlap. But you must also invoke your DR plan to fix the affected infrastructure or fail over to your secondary site. While your DR may have been successful, your BC plan must account for the aftermath of the event — which is often more important. The aftermath often revolves around communication. Eventually, the news that your organization was hit with a cyberattack will leak. How will you respond, and who will deliver the message?

How will you convey the lessons learned to regain customer and shareholder confidence? Your DR may end when you fail over and fail back following a disaster, but your BC encompasses the entire spectrum of an event. Get the free eBook, Organize for Innovation.

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