difference between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are risk management strategies that businesses rely on to prepare for unexpected incidents. While the terms are closely related, there are some key differences worth considering when choosing which is right for you:

• Business continuity plan (BCP): A BCP is a detailed plan that outlines the steps an organization will take to return to normal business functions in the event of a disaster. Where other types of plans might focus on one specific aspect of recovery and interruption prevention (such as a natural disaster or cyberattack), BCPs take a broad approach and aim to ensure an organization can face as broad a range of threats as possible.
• Disaster recovery plan (DRP):  More detailed in nature than BCPs, disaster recovery plans consist of contingency plans for how enterprises will specifically protect their IT systems and critical data during an interruption. Alongside BCPs, DR plans help businesses protect data and IT systems from many different disaster scenarios, such as massive outages, natural disasters,  ransomware  and  malware  attacks, and many others.
• Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR): Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) can be approached together or separately depending on business needs. Recently, more and more businesses are moving towards practicing the two disciplines together, asking executives to collaborate on BC and DR practices rather than work in isolation. This has led to combining the two terms into one, BCDR , but the essential meaning of the two practices remains unchanged.

Regardless of how you choose to approach the development of BCDR at your organization, it’s worth noting how quickly the field is growing worldwide. As the results of bad BCDR like data loss and downtime become more and more expensive, many enterprises are adding to their existing investments. Last year, companies worldwide were poised to spend USD 219 billion on cybersecurity and solutions, a 12% increase from the year before according to a recent report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) (link resides outside ibm.com).

Why are business continuity and disaster recovery plans important?

Business continuity plans (BCPs) and disaster recovery plans (DRPs) help organizations prepare for a broad range of unplanned incidents. When deployed effectively, a good DR plan can help stakeholders better understand the risks to regular business functions that a particular threat may pose. Enterprises that don’t invest in business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) are more likely to experience data loss, downtime, financial penalties and reputational damage due to unplanned incidents.

Here are some of the benefits that businesses who invest in business continuity and disaster recovery plans can expect:

• Shortened downtime: When a disaster shuts down normal business operations, it can cost enterprises hundreds of millions of dollars to get back up and running again. High-profile  cyberattacks  are particularly damaging, frequently attracting unwanted attention and causing investors and customers to flee to competitors who advertise shorter downtimes. Implementing a strong BCDR plan can shorten your recovery timeframe regardless of the kind of disaster you face.
• Lower financial risk: According to  IBM’s recent Cost of Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach was USD 4.45 million in 2023—a 15% increase since 2020. Enterprises with strong business continuity plans have shown they can reduce those costs significantly by shortening downtimes and increasing customer and investor confidence.
• Reduced penalties: Data breaches can result in large penalties when private customer information is leaked. Businesses that operate in the healthcare and personal finance space are at a higher risk because of the sensitivity of the data they handle. Having a strong business continuity strategy in place is imperative for businesses that operate in these sectors, helping keep the risk of heavy financial penalties relatively low.

How to build a business continuity disaster recovery plan

Business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) planning is most effective when businesses take a separate but coordinated approach. While business continuity plans (BCPs) and disaster recovery plans (DRPs) are similar, there are important differences that make developing them separately advantageous:

• Strong BCPs focus on tactics for keeping normal operations running before, during and immediately following a disaster. 
• DRPs tend to be more reactive, outlining ways to respond an incident and get everything back up and running smoothly.

Before we dive into how you can build effective BCPs and DRPs, let’s look at a couple of terms that are relevant to both:

• Recovery time objective (RTO):  RTO refers to the amount of time it takes to restore business processes after an unplanned incident. Establishing a reasonable RTO is one of the first things businesses need to do when they’re creating either a BCP or DRP. 
• Recovery point objective (RPO):  Your business’ recovery point objective (RPO) is the amount of data it can afford to lose in a disaster and still recover. Since data protection is a core capability of many modern enterprises, some constantly copy data to a remote  data center  to ensure continuity in case of a massive breach. Others set a tolerable RPO of a few minutes (or even hours) for business data to be recovered from a backup system and know they will be able to recover from whatever was lost during that time.

How to build a business continuity plan (BCP) 

While each business will have slightly different requirements when it comes to planning for business continuity, there are four widely used steps that yield strong results regardless of size or industry.

1. Run a business impact analysis 

Business impact analysis (BIA) helps organizations better understand the various threats they face. Strong BIA includes creating robust descriptions of all potential threats and any vulnerabilities they might expose. Also, the BIA estimates the likelihood of each event so the organization can prioritize them accordingly.

2. Create potential responses

For each threat you identify in your BIA, you’ll need to develop a response for your business. Different threats require different strategies, so for each disaster you might face it’s good to create a detailed plan for how you could potentially recover.

3. Assign roles and responsibilities

The next step is to figure out what’s required of everyone on your disaster recovery team in the event of a disaster. This step must document expectations and consider how individuals will communicate during an unplanned incident. Remember, many threats shut down key communication capabilities like cellular and Wi-Fi networks, so it’s wise to have communication fallback procedures you can rely on.

4. Rehearse and revise your plan

For each threat you’ve prepared for, you’ll need to constantly practice and refine BCDR plans until they are operating smoothly. Rehearse as realistic a scenario as you can without putting anyone at actual risk so team members can build confidence and discover how they are likely to perform in the event of an interruption to business continuity.

How to build a disaster recovery plan (DRP)

Like BCPs, DRPs identify key roles and responsibilities and must be constantly tested and refined to be effective. Here is a widely used four-step process for creating DRPs.

1. Run a business impact analysis

Like your BCP, your DRP begins with a careful assessment of each threat your company could face and what its implications could be. Consider the damage each potential threat could cause and the likelihood of it interrupting your daily business operations. Additional considerations could include loss of revenue, downtime, cost of reputational repair (public relations) and loss of customers and investors due to bad press.

2. Inventory your assets

Effective DRPs require you to know exactly what your enterprise owns. Regularly perform these inventories so you can easily identify hardware, software, IT infrastructure and anything else your organization relies on for critical business functions. You can use the following labels to categorize each asset and prioritize its protection—critical, important and unimportant.

• Critical:  Label assets critical if you depend on them for your normal business operations.
• Important:  Give this label to anything you use at least once a day and, if disrupted, would impact your critical operations (but not shut them down entirely).
• Unimportant:  These are the assets your business owns but uses infrequently enough to make them unessential for normal operations.

Like in your BCP, you’ll need to describe responsibilities and ensure your team members have what they need to perform them. Here are some widely used roles and responsibilities to consider:

• Incident reporter:  Someone who maintains contact information for relevant parties and communicates with business leaders and stakeholders when disruptive events occur.
• DRP  supervisor:  Someone who ensures team members perform the tasks they’ve been assigned during an incident. 
• Asset manager:  Someone whose job it is to secure and protect critical assets when a disaster strikes. 

4. Rehearse your plan

Just like with your BCP, you’ll need to constantly practice and update your DRP for it to be effective. Practice regularly and update your documents according to any meaningful changes that need to be made. For example, if your company acquires a new asset after your DRP has been formed, you’ll need to incorporate it into your plan going forward or it won’t be protected when disaster strikes.

Examples of strong business continuity and disaster recovery plans

Whether you need a business continuity plan (BCP), a disaster recovery plan (DRP), or both working together or separately, it can help to look at how other businesses have put plans in place to boost their preparedness. Here are a few examples of plans that have helped businesses with both BC and DR preparation.

• Crisis management plan:  A good crisis management plan could be part of either business continuity or disaster recovery planning. Crisis management plans are detailed documents that outline how you’ll manage a specific threat. They provide detailed instructions on how an organization will respond to a specific kind of crisis, such as a power outage, cybercrime or natural disaster; specifically, how they’ll deal with the hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute pressures while the event is unfolding. Many of the steps, roles and responsibilities required in business continuity and disaster recovery planning are relevant to good crisis management plans.
• Communications plan:  Communications plans (or comms plans) equally apply to business continuity and disaster recovery efforts. They outline how your organization will specifically address PR concerns during an unplanned incident. To build a good comms plan, business leaders typically coordinate with communications specialists to formulate their communications plans. Some have specific plans in place for disasters that are deemed both likely and severe , so they know exactly how they’ll respond.
• Network recovery plan:  Network recovery plans help organizations recover interruptions of network services, including internet access, cellular data, local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs). Network recovery plans are typically broad in scope since they focus on a basic and essential need—communication—and should be considered more on the side of business continuity than disaster recovery. Given the importance of many networked services to business operations, network recovery plans focus on the steps needed to restore services quickly and effectively after an interruption.
• Data center  recovery plan: A data center recovery plan is more likely to be included in a BCP than a DRP because of its focus on data security and threats to IT infrastructure. Some common threats to data backup include overstretched personnel, cyberattacks, power outages and difficulty following compliance requirements. 
• Virtualized recovery plan:  Like a data center plan, a virtualized recovery plan is more likely to be part of a BCP than a DRP because of a BCP’s focus on IT and data resources. Virtualized recovery plans rely on  virtual machine (VM)  instances that can swing into operation within a couple of minutes of an interruption. Virtual machines are representations/emulations of physical computers that provide critical application recovery through high availability (HA), or the ability of a system to operate continuously without failing.

Business continuity and disaster recovery solutions 

Even a minor interruption can put your business at risk. IBM has a wide range of contingency plans and disaster recovery solutions to help prepare your business to face a variety of threats including cloud backup and disaster recovery capabilities and security and resiliency services.

More from Cloud

The history of the central processing unit (cpu).

10 min read - The central processing unit (CPU) is the computer’s brain. It handles the assignment and processing of tasks, in addition to functions that make a computer run. There’s no way to overstate the importance of the CPU to computing. Virtually all computer systems contain, at the least, some type of basic CPU. Regardless of whether they’re used in personal computers (PCs), laptops, tablets, smartphones or even in supercomputers whose output is so strong it must be measured in floating-point operations per…

A clear path to value: Overcome challenges on your FinOps journey 

3 min read - In recent years, cloud adoption services have accelerated, with companies increasingly moving from traditional on-premises hosting to public cloud solutions. However, the rise of hybrid and multi-cloud patterns has led to challenges in optimizing value and controlling cloud expenditure, resulting in a shift from capital to operational expenses.   According to a Gartner report, cloud operational expenses are expected to surpass traditional IT spending, reflecting the ongoing transformation in expenditure patterns by 2025. FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline…

IBM Power8 end of service: What are my options?

3 min read - IBM Power8® generation of IBM Power Systems was introduced ten years ago and it is now time to retire that generation. The end-of-service (EoS) support for the entire IBM Power8 server line is scheduled for this year, commencing in March 2024 and concluding in October 2024. EoS dates vary by model: 31 March 2024: maintenance expires for Power Systems S812LC, S822, S822L, 822LC, 824 and 824L. 31 May 2024: maintenance expires for Power Systems S812L, S814 and 822LC. 31 October…

IBM Newsletters

Business continuity vs. disaster recovery: What's the difference?

Business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) are often used in coordination with one another, or even interchangeably as terms. But they are two different things. With the pandemic making the importance of business continuity known, leaders should understand the key differences between BC and DR.

What is business continuity? The big picture

BC is a methodology that allows organizations to keep their business running in the event of a crisis and return to full functionality when the crisis ends. It’s a process of continuous improvement that reflects both internal and external operations, focusing on preserving the functionality of the overall business. This includes setting up preventative controls and managing employees and customers.

[ Also read: What does a business continuity plan include? 5 key elements . ]

BC planning revolves around the actions your organization must take during and following an event to ensure that the business can function as usual. You need strategies in place, for example, to respond when resources such as equipment, workforce, workplace, third-party vendors, IT services, and data are unavailable.

3 factors a business continuity strategy should address

BC planning must include all factors that are involved in normal business operations. Your response strategy must account for the following three key factors:

1. Communications

When a crisis occurs, communication with your employees, users, and shareholders is critical. Human resources (HR) plays a key role in ensuring active, consistent, and timely communication between your organization and the staff.

For external communications, social media is a vital tool to provide timely updates to outside stakeholders and users. When an incident arises, many users turn to social media first for acknowledgment and updates.

For example, if Netflix goes down, users won’t go to  Netflix.com  for information; they’ll head to Netflix’s social accounts. Take control of your message and have a plan in place for responding on social.

2. Workforce response

Workforce response is equally important in the event of a crisis. Your employees should know who to contact and what is expected from them – especially what to avoid doing. It’s your responsibility to keep your employees informed and educated on these matters.

As businesses grow and threats evolve, it’s critical for employees to be involved in the BC plan. Keep them updated about the event, your organization’s BC plan, and any changes in BC policies.

3. IT infrastructure recovery

BC planning also includes IT infrastructure recovery: How will you bring your IT systems back online following a disaster?

This is where DR comes into play. The recovery strategy typically involves the BC and IT teams working hand in hand.

What is disaster recovery? A subset of BC

Disaster recovery, as part of an overall BC plan, is about restoring your IT systems and operations as efficiently as possible following a disaster. DR includes the backup systems and IT contingency methods for your organization’s critical functions and applications.

The objective is to minimize business downtime and reclaim access to your vital IT infrastructure and operations – including data, hardware, software, networking equipment, power, and connectivity – so you can get back up and running.

Where BC and DR overlap – and where they don't

While DR is a subset of BC, there are times when it can – and should – be used without activating your entire BC plan.

If you experience a power outage, for example, and you have a reliable DR plan in place, you can fail over to your secondary site and be up and running with little or no disruption to your internal and external users. In such cases, you wouldn’t need to invoke your entire BC plan.

BC can also act independently of DR, as long as the event hasn’t impacted your IT infrastructure. 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. But if there’s nothing wrong with your IT infrastructure, you’d only execute your BC plan.

Of course, your BC and DR plans often overlap. For example, if a wildfire takes out your data center, you need to enact your BC plan to communicate with those who’ve been affected and provide updates to your employees, customers, vendors, etc. But you must also invoke your DR plan to fix the affected infrastructure or fail over to your secondary site.

Planning for before, during, and after an event

BC is about more than just being prepared for an event; it’s about having plans in place for before, during, and after a disruption.

Suppose you’re hit with a cyberattack – you invoke your DR plan and quickly recover all your data. 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.

MORE ON BUSINESS CONTINUITY

• LogMeIn CIO: This is IT's time to shine on business continuity
• Crisis leadership: How to overcome anxiety
• Moving from COVID-19 crisis leadership to strategic leadership

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.

[ Are you leading through change? Get the free eBook,  Organize for Innovation . ]

Related content

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: Their Differences and How They Work Together

By Andy Marker | October 21, 2020 (updated October 17, 2021)

• Share on Facebook
• Share on LinkedIn

Link copied

Business continuity and disaster recovery are related approaches that organizations take to survive a crisis. Experts share the importance of the two methods today, when so much in business relies on technology and remote work.

Included on the page, you’ll learn about the difference between recovery plans and continuity plans , as well as recovery policy vs. continuity policy . You’ll also find an IT asset assessment tool .

What Is the Difference Between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity?

Though the terms disaster recovery and business continuity are often used interchangeably, they are different. Business continuity is the process of restoring an organization’s operations after a disruptive event. Disaster recovery focuses on restoring the technical and communications equipment and processes after an emergency. 

The term business continuity, disaster recovery (BCDR) refers to a comprehensive approach to facing an unplanned disruption, such as a natural disaster, a pandemic, or a denial-of-service attack. Business continuity planning creates procedures to ensure the safety of human resources and physical assets, as well as critical business activities continue during and after a crisis. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity that focuses on sustaining technology and communications systems. You can learn more in our comprehensive guide to business continuity .

“Business continuity is really about how we continue our business operations to generate revenue,” says Bryan Strawser, Principal and Chief Executive at Bryghtpath LLC . “Disaster recovery is more specifically about how to make the technology systems that the business relies upon redundant and recoverable.” 

Disaster recovery and business continuity also differ in timing. Disaster recovery applies at the moment (or immediately after) a crisis begins, and business continuity guides the business post-crisis and helps it to return to normal. 

In short, disaster recovery is reactive, and business continuity is proactive. With disaster recovery, the focus is on mitigating the disruptive incident’s immediate effects. Conversely, in business continuity you anticipate and protect against disruptions to boost the organization’s resilience, as well as guide the entire organization (including human, data, and infrastructure assets) through a crisis.  

Michael Fraser is CEO, Co-Founder, and Chief Architect at Refactr . He provides the following example of how business continuity and disaster recovery differ: “Disaster recovery is, ‘I had some services go down. How will I migrate the services or do what I need with these services to get them back up and running?’ 

“Continuity is the holistic plan to support all your business functions. For example, if there’s a disaster at your on-premises office, [the plan would be], ‘I have to forward all the phones to this number,’” he adds.

The following example shows how disaster recovery and business continuity work together when heavy rains flood a business park:

Disaster Recovery Plan vs. Business Continuity Plan

In the event of a disaster or an emergency, a business continuity plan provides a plan for maintaining activities through a crisis to limit disruption. A disaster recovery plan provides steps to restore data, equipment, and key programs immediately after an event. 

A disaster recovery plan describes the minimum function necessary for an organization to continue, while a business continuity plan describes the effort needed to restore the business to full operations.

What Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans Cover

How business continuity and disaster recovery overlap.

Although disaster recovery is considered a subset of business continuity, the methods can overlap. Following is a list of functional similarities:

• Emphasize protecting staff and other stakeholders and critical assets. 
• Prioritize activities and facilities that must resume operations quickly.
• Anticipate and analyze potential risks and threats, including events that could impact equipment and physical facilities or disrupt a distributed platform.
• Detail end-to-end steps for avoiding damage and disruption and recovering from disasters.

“Some organizations just do disaster recovery,” explains Fraser. “They don't do a full business continuity plan. The smaller the business, the more likely it is that you’re making sure that your internal systems and customer systems don't go down. The next piece is, ‘How do I make sure that the business itself continues to operate?’”

Business Continuity Plan

A business continuity plan describes the steps a company takes to move through disruption to resume regular business. A plan provides a way for the business to survive and avoid complete closure. 

A business continuity plan should detail the following items, as appropriate for your organization:

• Contact information for continuity leaders, key staff, and all employees
• Guidelines for when and how to use the plan
• Step-by-step procedures and checklists for recovery and continuity
• Communication plans for managing stakeholder relationships 
• Opportunities to test the plans in order to prepare employees to deal with disruptions 
• Continuous improvement strategies to include new learning from exercises and incidents in plan updates 

To learn more about writing a plan, see our how-to guide to writing a business continuity plan . For most useful free, downloadable business continuity plan (BCP) templates please read our  "Free Business Continuity Plan Templates"  article.

Disaster Recovery Plan

A disaster recovery plan includes the steps to avoid unplanned outages or recover from a disaster. A disaster recovery plan usually covers critical systems such as IT and communications equipment and technical operations.

“We think about disasters, but we don't think about the impact to us until it hits us directly,” says Fraser. Disaster recovery is critical for companies that can’t work without their data or access to online tools. See our article about the importance of business continuity to learn more. 

The concept of disaster recovery is sometimes bundled together with backup for disaster recovery. When you back up your data, you make copies of it (and other programs), either via on-premises media like flash drives or tapes, or in the cloud. Disaster recovery allows you to use those copies, if needed, for recovery. Today, backup and disaster recovery services are usually merged with malware protection.

“People are scared and nervous because today it's all about malware locking up your corpus of data and you have to pay a ransom,” says Harry Brelsford, CEO of SMB Nation and O365nation .

Although you deploy disaster recovery as a reaction to an incident, in a disaster recovery plan, you have to account for a time span of minutes or days and address the following items:

• Essential procedures and steps to recover critical equipment and processes (see this example of disaster recovery procedures ) 
• Contact information for all internal and external stakeholders, and a hierarchy chart of recovery team roles and responsibilities 
• Guidelines for when and how to initiate the plan
• Test guidelines to ensure that recovery plans work when needed
• Assurance that data will be available with minimal downtime.

To make disaster recovery planning easier, download one of these disaster recovery plan templates .

The Cloud and Disaster Recovery

With the advent of cloud computing, much restoration falls to what is sometimes called disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) . Simply put, DRaaS is the complete backup of all applications and data to the cloud. 

In addition to backup, cloud services may provide failover services. In failover, when a system fails, another redundant system immediately resumes the functions of the original system. Learn more about the benefits of and best practices for including the cloud in disaster recovery in our article about cloud computing and business continuity .

Service-Level Agreements and Disaster Recovery

Service-level agreements (SLAs) specify your customers’ expectations of you, as well as your expectations of your own IT and cloud vendors. In an SLA, you describe recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) as service-time tier levels. 

You can also include tier levels in your recovery plan. If you don’t have well-defined SLAs, consider using this downloadable SLA template to build them.

Disaster Recovery Plan for IT and Network Assessments

As you develop a disaster recovery plan, a critical method of understanding your IT assets is to audit your end-to-end digital environment. A network assessment tool analyzes and reports on your IT infrastructure, including device types, applications, security, processes, and performance. 

IT and network assessments are valuable for a few reasons. With readily available, user-friendly SaaS applications, small-scale devices, and remote work, it's easy for people to add assets without first getting approval (this is known as shadow IT ). You also need to be aware of whether you've outgrown your setup — and if you are making significant changes (such as migrating to the cloud), you need to understand what assets you have.

“Use a tool, not a notebook,” advises Brelsford. Online assessment tools trace your network to detect open ports and note which programs people use. For small shops, a physical inventory may be sufficient.

At-a-Glance IT Assessment Template

An IT assessment is important even for small and micro-businesses. Download this simple, customizable template to note all devices, like desktops and printers, and the software on each, and current antivirus programs. 

‌Download At-a-Glance IT Assessment Template 

Word | PDF | Google Docs

Consider the guideline ISO 24762, Information and Communications Technology Disaster Recovery , to gain a strong understanding of disaster recovery practices. This document provides a framework of requirements for third-party disaster recovery vendors. 

Even if your organization is small, you can use these guidelines to shape your internal recovery activities.

Disaster Recovery Policy vs. Business Continuity Policy

Business continuity and disaster recovery policies provide the framework for BCDR planning for individual organizations. Each policy specifies the scope of efforts, responsible roles, and required recovery planning activities. For regulated businesses, policies may be imperative. 

In addition to defining legal and contractual obligations, as well as the limitations, exclusions, and assumptions for BCDR planning, policies may specify metrics for gauging compliance with the plans. Examples of continuity and recovery metrics include key performance indicators (KPIs) and key risk indicators (KRIs). Learn more about KPIs in our guide to KPI dashboards and learn about KRIs from our guide to risk management .

What Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Policies Cover

Business continuity and disaster recovery policy differences.

The two types of policies have some differences. Disaster recovery policy focuses on protecting data and restoring the minimum technical functions for the business to continue. Conversely, business continuity policy focuses on processes to support IT and the rest of the business functions as the firm resumes normal activities.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Policy Similarities

Business continuity and disaster recovery policies are similar in the following functions:

• Provide a foundation for each plan to limit disruption and continue key operations. 
• Detail continuity or recovery leadership, roles, and responsibilities.
• Specify scope of the plan, including exclusions, inclusions, and limitations.
• Note any legal, regulatory, or other standards an organization must observe. 
• Prescribe the type and frequency of testing and exercises.
• List restoration priority for functions and departments.
• Note who verifies compliance and resolves disputes and questions.
• Provide a benchmark for evaluating adherence to plan and compliance, as well as understanding how to mitigate implementation problems.
• Specify a schedule for regularly updating plans to reflect business changes and learnings from continuous improvement efforts.
• One Nine: 9 percent availability, which equates to more than 332 days of downtime out of 365 days
• Two Nines: 99 percent availability, or 3 days, 15 hours, and 40 minutes of downtime per year
• Three Nines: 99.9 percent availability, or 8 hours, 46 minutes of downtime per year
• Four Nines: 99.99 percent availability, or 52 minutes, 36 seconds of downtime per year
• Five Nines: 99.999 percent availability, or 5 minutes, 15 seconds, or less, of downtime per year

Disaster Recovery Policy Examples

Many organizations post their policies online. You’ll often find these policies are brief and straightforward.

Both of these policies for nonprofit and government organizations contain detailed definitions. They also emphasize responsibility and detail plan requirements: 

• Maine State Government
• Weill Cornell Hospital

One of these corporate records is more of a policy statement for a large company. The other is a smartly designed customer-facing document. 

Educational

These disaster recovery policies for IT at educational facilities display different approaches to an online document: a web page versus an online PDF. 

• Fordham University
• St. Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals

Empower Your Teams to Achieve Business Continuity with Smartsheet

Empower your people to go above and beyond with a flexible platform designed to match the needs of your team — and adapt as those needs change. 

The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed. 

When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time.  Try Smartsheet for free, today.

Discover why over 90% of Fortune 100 companies trust Smartsheet to get work done.

• Accessibility Policy
• Skip to content
• QUICK LINKS
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
• Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications
• Download Java
• Careers at Oracle

What Is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

Aaron Ricadela | Content Strategist | April 26, 2024

In This Article

What Is Business Continuity?

What is disaster recovery, what is bcdr (business continuity and disaster recovery), bcdr explained, why is business continuity & disaster recovery important for businesses, what components are included in a bcdr plan, how to build a bcdr plan, future of bcdr, simplify your business continuity strategy with oracle cloud infrastructure.

Businesses need to keep running during times of crisis. A central part of the challenge is bridging through and recovering from computer system crashes that can put a halt to sales, operations, production, and transportation. Whether IT outages are caused by human actions, software bugs, extreme weather, or natural disasters, organizations need well-planned operational and technical strategies for getting through a crisis with key processes intact, then quickly recovering and resuming normal work.

Unplanned, disruptive events that impede critical business operations can harm brand reputation and lead to financial losses and regulatory reprimands. That’s why organizations have long maintained comprehensive continuity plans and backup systems. Now, the proliferation of cloud computing and newer application architectures inspired by the internet are changing the way organizations plan for operating through outages, design disaster recovery systems for retrieving critical data, and allocate budgets for improved resilience.

While plans that use geographically distanced physical data centers as the basis for disaster recovery are common, here we will focus on newer strategies that involve using cloud services.

Running some applications in both a data center and a cloud infrastructure service can be a simple, affordable way to improve resilience by geographically distributing application systems. Costs can be kept down further by running smaller or standby instances in the cloud and scaling them up only when needed.

As we’ll see, one of the toughest decisions will involve deciding how to keep constantly updated copies of critical data stores, such that losing one copy only temporarily interrupts operations. For instance, a system that allows customers to manage their accounts is useful only if the customer can see their purchases and create new ones. If a disaster disrupts that access, the application isn’t useful. Database replication strategies are often a chief factor in creating a resilient strategy.

Business continuity plans provide an organization’s leaders with roadmaps for keeping operations running when a disaster or IT failure disrupts the normal flow of work and takes the applications they rely on offline. The plans detail the people, processes, and technology strategies an organization needs to keep working effectively during a catastrophe. The most common reasons for interruptions to normal operations are human technical errors and software bugs that cause crashes, according to experts. Natural disasters, and increasingly, system problems caused by overheated data centers due to extreme weather can lead to business interruptions. Terrorism, cyber criminals, and war can also be causes.

Business continuity plans, while including disaster recovery of software applications and data, go broader, encompassing staff communication, ensuring workers have physical access to computers and mobile devices, and needed changes to supply chains and other operational considerations.

In addition to planning for the people, processes, and technology needed to maintain operations during a disruption, businesses need a concrete plan for recovering access to critical systems, data, and applications. Disaster recovery describes the detailed technical plans businesses create for getting workloads up and running again in their order of importance, the budgets they allocate for doing so, and plans for testing the strategy.

The goal is to minimize downtime and data loss while balancing the cost to protect each computing workload. Here’s where cloud technologies can help.

When computing was primarily done on client-server systems in company-owned or rented data centers, IT budgets could double or triple for each application that needed its own set of licenses, duplicate servers, storage, networking, and cooling, all running in facilities an appropriate distance from the company’s production data center. Cloud computing has changed the math, letting businesses deploy mission-critical applications to multiple cloud regions, or data centers. Cloud technologies also let IT departments quickly change the size of server resources, or instances, and add more capacity as needed using remote management tools.

Businesses need to make critical choices on two key disaster recovery metrics: How quickly do we need to recover from an outage, and what is an acceptable amount of data loss?

The recovery time objective (RTO) measures how long a business is willing to wait until service is restored, and the recovery point objective (RPO) determines the maximum amount of data a business is willing to lose in a disaster. The lower the thresholds the better, but the more a disaster recovery plan will cost to implement. Each system IT runs will have its own RTO and RPO. A sales transaction system will have short recovery times and points, while an employee expense system could reasonably be recovered a few days after a disaster.

Business continuity and disaster recovery refers to the technologies, policies, and procedures an organization puts in place to ensure it can continue operating in the event of a disaster or other unplanned interruption. BCDR involves identifying potential risks to uptime and developing strategies to recover and resume normal operations as quickly as possible.

Business continuity and disaster recovery strategies have become more important for a broader swath of companies as more transactions with customers, suppliers, and other partners are done online, and data volumes have swelled. Further, more systems have become interdependent. That customer portal that lets customers see past orders and make new ones may require connections with inventory management , fulfillment, and production management systems. Since they’re all required, each will inherit the shortest RTO and RPO requirements of the group.

While business continuity is important for companies in every sector, effective BCDR plans can be particularly critical for organizations in certain industries. For example, companies in highly regulated sectors including banking, energy, and healthcare have rigorous business continuity requirements and often can’t tolerate the time it takes to recover data from backup copies. And certain subsectors, such as capital markets trading, can’t afford to lose even minutes’ worth of data.

Businesses should start their BCDR planning with an impact analysis that details what disasters may take place and the types of losses that could result. The plan should include technical configuration errors, natural disasters, acts of terrorism, and cybersecurity incidents such as ransomware attacks. Since data volumes today are much higher than in decades past, business leaders need to prioritize processes and their associated software applications, determining which are mission-critical and placing others in ranked groups of importance, called tiers, where more lenient RTO and RPO standards can apply.

Identifying the most critical areas of a business and estimating the amount of downtime each one could tolerate will help create a plan for keeping those functions running, including data backups, “pilot light” IT installments that can help start broader computing operations, and the technology setups employees would need to work from home. Pilot light systems can be thought of as warm standby systems, and as long as they can reach critical data stores, these cloud-based systems can be up and running in minutes after a disaster.

Cloud computing technologies are important tools that can help companies implement business continuity and disaster recovery plans without breaking their budgets.

Hybrid IT setups , in which some computing resources run in the public cloud and some run in on-premises data centers, have lowered the cost of disaster recovery. Cloud workloads built with microservices—collections of small software components running on distributed, virtual servers working in tandem to deliver applications to users—let companies create so-called “pilot light” IT deployments, that is, live, up-to-date data with idle services that can be used to restart a system in a cloud data center. Hybrid cloud environments do require businesses to identify, catalog, and manage application dependencies that would prevent a software program from restarting if another it relies on is offline.

Some businesses are working to move all their applications to the cloud, with the goal of eventually shutting down their data centers. Several drivers are typically at work here, including a desire to integrate in-house applications more easily with other cloud-based systems; simpler system and application management; better application scalability, availability, and upgradability; and superior BCDR. The business continuity benefits include the ability to keep pilot light systems in cloud data centers in geographically disparate cloud regions, fewer concerns for employee and customer accessibility in a disaster, and a fundamentally more bullet-proof application design with few or no single points of failure. Getting all these benefits requires more than simply moving an existing application to run in a cloud data center, however. It requires rearchitecting and recoding the application.

The process is known as refactoring, and the best architecture for that effort is cloud services . Refactoring can be time-consuming and expensive. However, the resulting applications are more resilient, versatile, and scalable—all outcomes that benefit your BCDR strategy. The application will also be easier to modify to provide new functionality. For instance, adding analytics and AI functionality becomes a more manageable process as these are just new web services to use within the app.

Businesses need to prioritize their workloads by necessary availability, RTO, and RPO when planning a disaster recovery approach that fits their budget. Restoring systems from a backup copy may be the least expensive path—though large data sets can take a very long time to recover, and offline backups will have a long RPO. Still, offline backups are important, especially for critical data, and may be the only viable option to recover from a ransomware incident. Pilot light deployments can restore systems to running status in minutes instead of hours but are more expensive to maintain.

Warm standby methods, which combine live, up-to-date data with cloud-based application replicas that can handle requests while running at lower capacity, have RPOs measured in seconds and RTOs in minutes. A so-called active/active failover approach using multiple live sites running at full capacity can deliver recovery times and points of nearly zero but is the most expensive.

Disaster Recovery Trade Offs

Businesses need to make decisions about recovery time, data loss, and costs when planning a DR strategy

Source: Oracle

What is the Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

Business continuity plans help make sure a company can continue operating and delivering its products or services during a crisis. BC involves putting the people, processes, and technology in place to get through a disaster scenario.

Disaster recovery is the facet of business continuity concerned with getting IT operations back up and running quickly and with minimal data loss. It encompasses technical plans for restarting computing workloads and a tiered approach to recovery based on applications’ importance and dependencies.

Key Takeaways

• Business continuity plans can benefit from clearly defined roles and sponsorship by a visible executive.
• Disaster recovery strategies should include provisions for restoring data at a site or cloud data center that’s safe from the disruption. They should document critical systems whose work needs to be distributed among multiple sites for immediate availability in the event of a server failure—or for resilience against natural disasters and regional outages.
• BCDR often involves trade-offs, and organizations must weigh how quickly they need to recover from an unplanned IT outage, the amount of data they’re willing to lose, and the cost and complexity of maintaining their backup systems.
• Use of cloud computing and virtualization can prevent excessive spending on duplicating workloads that need very quick recovery times. Cloud technologies such as containers and virtual machines let businesses restore workloads from smaller, less costly IT environments often running in third party cloud data centers.
• Businesses planning DR strategies need to look closely at application dependencies that could prevent a key software program from starting if another that it relies on is offline. Critical, disaster-prone applications may benefit from a rewrite to remove single points of failure.

Business continuity planning should start with an assessment of potential risks. Organizations should then measure the expected impact of those risks on processes and identify the team members who’ll take on defined roles to mitigate them. Plans should also capture how the company will maintain employee communications, account for customer service and sales contingencies, and adjust supply chains. And they shouldn’t depend on any one person to bring systems back online.

Companies need to create an inventory of their hardware and software assets that documents the dependencies among them. Components of systems that will run only during disasters need especially careful testing, since they aren’t ordinarily used and are prone to failure.

The most successful BCDR programs map dependencies, determine application tiers, assess risk, undergo regular testing, and feature skilled teams and a visible executive sponsor, according to research from PwC .

It's important for businesses to differentiate between high availability and disaster recovery when planning their cloud computing approaches. Public clouds that include so-called availability zones within a few kilometers of one another, or even within the same building complex, can help ensure that if there’s a failure in one data center, customers’ workloads will continue running in the others in the zone. While this approach provides higher availability, it doesn’t cover disasters with a wider radius, such as major weather events, regional blackouts, and heatwaves.

Disruptive events, natural disasters, or unforeseen IT failures can impede sales and operations, render offices unusable, knock data centers offline, or destroy plants and equipment. Financial losses often follow. A business continuity and disaster recovery plan can let organizations respond swiftly during a crisis, limiting losses, meeting compliance requirements, and continuing to serve customers.

Severe computer outages that wreak havoc on operations can cause financial damage to the tune of US$100,000 per hour, according to estimates. Southwest Airlines, for example, grounded nearly 2,000 flights in April 2023 after a network firewall problem, leaving passengers stranded at terminals or on tarmacs. And unplanned outages are becoming more expensive: A 2022 survey of 830 companies by IT advisory group Uptime Institute found that a quarter of unplanned outages cost affected businesses more than US$1 million. Of those surveyed, 29% had revenues less than US$1 million, 28% earned between US$1 million and US$9.99 million, and the remainder were US$10 million or above.

Business continuity plans include comprehensive assessments of potential risks and the interruptions to operations they would cause, how internal staff and suppliers could be affected, and the financial losses and regulatory fines that could result. They also detail the personnel, processes, and technical steps needed to get back online and operational and recover any missing data. Training and testing are also essential.

A strong BCDR plan includes the following:

• Identification of scenarios which would interrupt normal business processes, noting essential people, resources, facilities likely affected and that will require attention during recovery.
• A business impact analysis with a discussion of recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives. The analysis should include estimates of lost sales and profits following a disaster, factoring in how much risk those losses would pose to the company’s survival.
• A strategy for selecting and provisioning backup sites , and for distributing workloads in a public cloud in a way that lets operations restart promptly.
• A ranking of critical and important business applications that need to be restarted first and a map of IT dependencies that could impede getting those apps online.
• Changes to operations, the risks involved, and a program for educating staff about contingency planning.
• Provisions for continuous improvement of the plan and approval from line-of-business (LOB) executives whose groups would potentially be involved. Individual lines of business should also identify scenarios which would interrupt their work, the people, resources, sites, and technology involved, and develop plans for responding to those scenarios.

Building a BCDR plan involves several steps, beginning with assembling a team of key stakeholders. By following this process, you can build a comprehensive BCDR plan that will help protect your business and minimize disruptions in the event of an emergency.

• Identify and build a team of people, including an executive sponsor, that’s responsible for creating and implementing the plan and ensuring that it’s kept up to date and periodically tested.
• Catalog the physical and IT assets that could be affected by a disaster.
• Conduct a business impact analysis of operations and locations that could be disrupted by a disaster or an unforeseen outage, including the impact on suppliers, distributors, retailers, and other outside parties.
• Establish an alternate site where staff can work during the disruption, and create a plan for communicating with employees during that time. Alternatively, determine how employees can work from wherever they may be during a disaster.
• Create a disaster recovery plan that ensures recovery times are commensurate with an application’s importance, keeping in mind that large data sets can take a very long time to recover from a backup system.
• IT teams should determine which workloads can be restored from backup, which require live data combined with services running at reduced capacity, and which workloads always need full-service capacity even when running on backup servers. Decide on their RPOs and RTOs and develop recovery processes to meet them.
• Test the business continuity and disaster recovery plans, either through tabletop testing, consisting of a verbal run-through of the steps key stakeholders would take, or through an actual walk-through of those measures. Temporary cloud deployments can help significantly in testing recovery procedures.

On the IT side, pay special attention to testing components of systems that will be used only during disasters.

Download the free business continuity and disaster recovery plan (DOC)

The business continuity and disaster recovery fields are looking to new technologies to automate work and improve accuracy. At the forefront is generative AI, which can comb through standards and documents about best practices to create a starting point for a BCDR plan. The technology can draw connections between business processes and the resources behind them, helping create the business impact analysis.

AI tools can then save business continuity managers hours of time by finding detailed information in the impact analysis that can inform the recovery plan.

Generative AI in IT development and operations can also analyze usage spikes and abnormal changes in access to data that staff could miss and that could indicate a pending outage. It can also help identify software dependencies and be used to re-architect systems to have fewer single points of failure.

Cloud computing with Oracle technology provides several safeguards against computing downtime as the result of a disaster. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) employs a unique and especially resilient approach that separates each of its global cloud regions, which provide services across geographic areas, into availability domains, which are isolated from one another. Availability domains in the same region each have their own power and cooling systems, so a failure at one domain in the region is unlikely to bring down computing work in another.

The availability domains are connected to one another by a low-latency, high-bandwidth network, letting customers build systems that can be replicated across availability domains for high-availability and disaster recovery. The network also connects cloud environments to on-premises computing for hybrid cloud environments.

Each OCI availability domain in turn includes three fault domains so computing instances don’t reside on the same hardware within an availability domain. This architecture also helps protect against unplanned outages. Oracle’s strategy is to deploy two or more cloud regions in countries where it operates a public cloud to address customers’ data residency requirements.

In addition, Oracle Database includes Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology for built-in redundancy, whether workloads are running on OCI or Microsoft Azure. A separate product, Oracle Active Data Guard , real-time, remote standby copy of data for higher availability and disaster recovery of Oracle Database. For customers with the most demanding and sophisticated DR needs, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure GoldenGate can replicate data at the block level, providing quick recovery times from recovery points.

A comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plan can help minimize downtime, financial losses, and reputation damage. It also provides a sense of security to employees, customers, and stakeholders, knowing that the organization is prepared to handle unexpected situations, comply with regulatory requirements, and protect critical data and assets. The peace of mind and resilience that a BCDR plan offers make it worth the effort for businesses of all sizes.

A distributed cloud provides the flexibility to choose where and how services are delivered to meet your needs—including BCDR. See why Oracle has been named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure. Get the free report now.

What do you include in a BCDR plan?

A business continuity and disaster recovery plan should include a risk assessment of the potential errors and events that could interrupt normal operations, an impact analysis of what assets and computer systems would be affected, an estimate of potential financial losses, and provisions for keeping people and processes running during a crisis. BCDR plans also include detailed technical descriptions of how a business will bring key applications back online and make sure employees have access to data while minimizing its loss. Training for staff is also an important component.

What does BCP stand for?

BCP stands for business continuity plan, which includes a detailed strategy and a catalog of the processes and systems that let a company maintain its operations through an unforeseen disruption. A BCP includes provisions for managing people, processes, and technology during a crisis, with the goal of returning to normal work as quickly as possible.

Disaster recovery plan vs. business continuity plan: Is there a difference?

Disaster recovery and business continuity are two terms often used interchangeably ' but doing so risks missing some of the key differences between the two strategies. To debunk the disaster recovery plan vs. business continuity plan debate, we look at:

• What each means
• Where the two are similar
• How they differ
• Why they are often confused
• Whether your organization needs both

What is Business Continuity?

Definitions of a business continuity plan vary, as you'd expect; as with any corporate strategy term, there are different interpretations. But while definitions may diverge slightly, the general understanding is that a business continuity plan (BCP) is designed to ensure that your business can maintain its operations in the event of a disaster, whatever form that might take. On the other hand, a disaster recovery plan focuses on how your organization will recover and rebuild following any crisis. IT firm Phoenix NAP believes that 'Disaster Recovery (DR) versus Business Continuity (BC) are two entirely different strategies, each of which plays a significant aspect in safeguarding business operations.' Best practice business continuity plans follow a set pattern with some standard features. A comprehensive BCP will:

• Identify the potential risks your business faces
• Allocate responsibility, putting in place the teams you need to continue operations
• Be built on best practice subsidiary and entity data
• Make back-up arrangements for power, systems and communications
• Prepare for recovery, identifying your disaster recovery team and the steps you will take to build back

This last point is where the potential 'grey area' between business continuity and disaster recovery starts to become apparent. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity planning and a vital element of a BCP. As well as planning for an immediate crisis-driven response, a business continuity plan should consider 'what happens next.' It's not just about how you deal with the immediate aftermath of a crisis, whether that's a cyber-attack, fire, flood, terrorist attack or any other human-made or natural disaster. It's about what you do next to restore operations on a more permanent footing. This is where the disaster recovery element of your planning comes in.

What is Disaster Recovery?

The disaster recovery plan and business continuity are very closely interlinked. Disaster recovery is the process of ' as you might imagine ' recovering after any business interruption or crisis. As InvenioIT puts it, 'A disaster recovery plan ...aims to answer the question: 'How do we recover from a disaster?'' What does a disaster recovery plan entail? It is typically a formal document, with details of steps needed to ensure you can recover rapidly from any disruption. IBM believes that a DR plan is more focused than a business continuity plan; as we said above, a subset of the BCP that focuses on how you recover your IT and systems to ensure operations return to normal as soon as possible. These formalized plans came into being in the 1970s. Businesses switched from being paper-based operations to ones dependent on systems and computer-based operations, technologies that require rapid response and clear action plans for contingency and recovery. Minimizing downtime by having recovery plans for your IT infrastructure and other operations means businesses can reduce the length and impact of any unexpected disruption.

Disaster Recovery Plan vs. Business Continuity Plan: How Do BCP and DR Plans Differ?

What is the difference between a disaster recovery plan and a business continuity plan? Given that you need to consider both business continuity and disaster recovery, it's worth exploring the two differences. Partly, as we mentioned above, the difference is about scope. The BCP is broad, while a DR plan will be more focused, looking specifically at how to get systems up and running in the aftermath of a disaster. An IT disaster can take many forms, from a localized hardware failure to a company-wide data breach ' and can have huge ramifications, with some 93% of businesses suffering an IT disaster going on to file for bankruptcy within a year . Another difference is in timing; the BCP should kick in as soon as a disruption is identified. Potentially, this means moving to back-up servers, power generators, remote working. On the other hand, the recovery plan tends to follow once the initial emergency response is in place, looking further ahead to determine how the business will rebuild and return to more normal operations. In either case, a written plan is vital, including a detailed business impact analysis that should be updated regularly. We've written before about the importance of keeping your business continuity plan up-to-date ' a lack of accurate data on your systems can significantly impact your ability to maintain operations and recover longer-term. Central to this is the need to maintain accurate information on all your entities and subsidiaries . Doing so enables you to methodically record the systems and technologies that will be impacted by an outage across the entirety of your organization. Once you're confident that you have captured all the applications and hardware you need to consider, your disaster recovery plan should include:

• Detailed plans for restoring each of these critical applications and pieces of infrastructure
• The timeframe for doing so
• The people who need to be involved ' along with emergency contact details to ensure they can be contacted in the event of any communications interruption

The ramifications of a disaster can be significant for an organization, including lost income, reputational damage, regulatory breaches and associated penalties, financial or otherwise, and missed opportunities for business growth while recovery is prioritized. The 'disaster recovery plan vs. business continuity plan' debate, then, is slightly spurious ' because you clearly need both. Having defined plans, both to respond in the immediate aftermath of a crisis, and to recover following the initial crisis period, is essential. To help organizations with their planning, both for business continuity and disaster recovery, Diligent has long-standing expertise and a suite of solutions. The software supports businesses that manage entities, compliance and organizational documents, enabling companies to minimize and mitigate the risks posed by any disruption. You can find out more by getting in touch to request a demo.

Solutions Solutions

• Board Management
• Enterprise Risk Management
• Audit Management
• Market Intelligence

Resources Resources

• Research & Reports

Company Company

Your data matters.

Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery: 5 Key Differences

Fill out the form below and we’ll email you more information about UCF’s online Leadership and Management programs.

• Name * First Last
• Degree * Career and Technical Education, BS Career and Workforce Education, MA College Teaching and Leadership Corrections Leadership Destination Marketing and Management Educational Leadership, MA Emergency and Crisis Management, MECM Engineering Management, MS Event Management Health Informatics and Information Management, BS Health Services Administration, BS Hospitality Management, BS Industrial Engineering, MSIE Lifestyle Community Management, BS Local Director of Career & Technical Education Lodging and Restaurant Management, BS Master of Public Administration, MPA Nonprofit Management Nonprofit Management, MNM Police Leadership Project Engineering Public Administration
• Phone This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Privacy Notice

Many professionals operate under the assumption that their workplace will remain largely unchanged from one day to the next, finding comfort in rhythms and routines. Sometimes, however, events disrupt business as usual. A critical aspect of leadership is preparing for those interruptions, creating strategies and plans that can keep core business functions intact even under duress.

Two specific fields address potential business interruptions: business continuity and disaster recovery. These disciplines minimize the impact that a catastrophic event might have on a business’s ability to reliably deliver its products and services.

While both fields are important, and even similar in some aspects, they are not synonymous. There are important differences in business continuity vs. disaster recovery, and those in leadership or emergency preparedness roles can benefit from understanding the core distinctions.

One way to develop a clear understanding of business continuity vs. disaster recovery is through studying emergency management. An online program in this field can offer professionals the skills needed to successfully lead companies through different kinds of crises.

Why Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Matter

Business continuity outlines exactly how a business will proceed during and following a disaster. It may provide contingency plans, outlining how the business will continue to operate even if it has to move to an alternate location. Business continuity planning may also take into account smaller interruptions or minor disasters, such as extended power outages.

Disaster recovery refers to the plans a business puts into place for responding to a catastrophic event, such as a natural disaster, fire, act of terror, active shooter or cybercrime. Disaster recovery involves the measures a business takes to respond to an event and return to safe, normal operation as quickly as possible.

The Importance of Advanced Planning

When businesses face disasters and don’t have the proper plans in place, the effects can be catastrophic. The most obvious effect is financial loss; the longer a business goes without delivering its products and services, the greater its financial losses. Eventually, these losses may force a business to make tough decisions, such as cutting employees. But there can also be technological consequences, including the loss of important or sensitive data.

Having business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place can help companies minimize the consequences of a catastrophic event. They can also provide peace of mind; employees and business owners alike may feel more comfortable in a work setting where there are clear policies for how to respond to disasters.

In many companies, crisis management professionals are responsible for developing and implementing these plans, evaluating and revising them as needed, and training employees to ensure they know how to follow the specified strategies.

Similarities Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning often seem interdependent. While the two concepts are not the same, they overlap in some areas and work best when developed in tandem.

• Both are proactive strategies that help a business prepare for sudden, cataclysmic events. Instead of reacting to a disaster, both disciplines take a preemptive approach, seeking to minimize the effects of a catastrophe before it occurs.
• Businesses can use both to prepare for a range of ecological and human-made disasters. Business continuity and disaster recovery are instrumental to preparing for pandemics, natural disasters, wildfires and even cyberattacks.
• Both require regular review, and they may sometimes require revision to ensure they match the company’s evolving goals. An emergency management leader will continually test and modify these plans as needed.

Differences Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

A closer look at business continuity vs. disaster recovery reveals some key distinctions. Ultimately, these differences highlight the fact that businesses need to have plans of both kinds in place to be sufficiently prepared for disaster.

• Business continuity focuses on keeping business operational during a disaster, while disaster recovery focuses on restoring data access and IT infrastructure after a disaster. In other words, the former is concerned with keeping the shop open even in unusual or unfavorable circumstances, while the latter focuses on returning it to normal as expediently as possible.
• Unlike business continuity plans, disaster recovery strategies may involve creating additional employee safety measures, such as conducting fire drills or purchasing emergency supplies. Combining the two allows a business to place equal focus on maintaining operations and ensuring that employees are safe.
• Business continuity and disaster recovery have different goals. Effective business continuity plans limit operational downtime, whereas effective disaster recovery plans limit abnormal or inefficient system function. Only by combining the two plans can businesses comprehensively prepare for disastrous events.
• A business continuity strategy can ensure communication methods such as phones and network servers continue operating in the midst of a crisis. Meanwhile, a disaster recovery strategy helps to ensure an organization’s ability to return to full functionality after a disaster occurs. To put it differently, business continuity focuses on keeping the lights on and the business open in some capacity, while disaster recovery focuses on getting operations back to normal.
• Some businesses may incorporate disaster recovery strategies as part of their overall business continuity plans. Disaster recovery is one step in the broader process of safeguarding a company against all contingencies.

Leadership in Times of Crisis

Crisis management is an important skill for all business leaders. In fact, crisis management draws upon many of the other skills necessary for business success. Analytical and problem-solving skills as well as flexibility in decision making are essential for assessing potential threats and determining how to proactively address them. Communication skills, both verbal and written, are necessary for articulating a plan and training employees on how they should act in response to a crisis.

“Leadership in managing crises can minimize the damage imposed by an incident while lack of effective leadership worsens the impact,” says Naim Kapucu, Pegasus Professor and director of the School of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida (UCF) . “Organizations should have leaders with crisis management competencies to effectively manage disasters and crises based on the contingencies and environmental and organizational factors.”

Crisis management skills matter because any company can experience a catastrophe that limits its ability to function as normal, and often it will have little time to pivot and adapt. “Crises are not a good time to reorganize adequately operating organizational systems, much less try to implement wholesale organizational changes or reforms,” says Kapucu. Having a plan in place, ready to be executed, can make all the difference. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into stark relief the uncertainty that businesses face and the extreme disruptions that can take place.

Programs such as the University of Central Florida’s online Master of Emergency and Crisis Management can help leaders fortify the knowledge, competencies, and skills they need to help their enterprises weather these times of crisis.

Crisis Management Careers

Crisis management is a key part of several careers. Each of the following positions offers a different level of leadership through tumultuous times.

Emergency Management Director

Emergency management directors develop and execute the plans that businesses follow to respond to natural disasters and other emergencies. Strong analytical, problem-solving, delegation and communication skills are essential. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual median salary for emergency management directors in 2019 was $74,590.

Disaster Program Manager

Disaster program managers may coordinate shelters, manage triage centers or organize other services in the wake of a disaster. These professionals must be skilled in remaining calm under extreme pressure; empathy and understanding are also important. The annual median salary for this role was around $48,000, according to May 2020 PayScale data.

Geographic Systems Information Coordinator

Geographic systems information coordinators use a wide range of data sources, such as land surveys, to help anticipate and prepare for different disasters. Technical skills and data analysis competencies are vital for success in this role. PayScale reports that the annual median salary for these coordinators was around $58,000 as of May 2020.

Emergency Preparedness Manager

Emergency preparedness managers are typically responsible for making sure employees and customers are safe. They may report directly to the emergency preparedness director, whose role is more comprehensive. The annual median salary of emergency preparedness managers was around $69,000 as of May 2020, according to PayScale.

Developing a Career in Emergency Management

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans help businesses prepare for worst-case scenarios; they provide peace of mind, a sense of stability and key safeguards against major loss and disruption. The University of Central Florida’s online Master of Emergency and Crisis Management (MECM) degree program helps professionals prepare for this important work.

The MECM curriculum exposes students to key emergency management skills, including developing, testing and communicating plans. It emphasizes the financial, ethical, political and practical dimensions of disaster response. Find out more about the MECM degree program today and embark on a new career on the front lines of crisis management.

Online Leadership and Management Degrees at UCF

• Career and Technical Education, BS
• Career and Workforce Education, MA
• College Teaching and Leadership
• Corrections Leadership
• Destination Marketing and Management
• Educational Leadership, MA
• Emergency and Crisis Management, MECM
• Engineering Management, MS
• Event Management
• Health Informatics and Information Management, BS
• Health Services Administration, BS
• Hospitality Management, BS
• Industrial Engineering, MSIE
• Lifestyle Community Management, BS
• Local Director of Career & Technical Education
• Lodging and Restaurant Management, BS
• Master of Public Administration, MPA
• Nonprofit Management
• Nonprofit Management, MNM
• Police Leadership
• Project Engineering
• Public Administration

You May Also Enjoy

Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery: Key Differences

Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery, what are the key differences? This article reviews differences in priorities, timing, scope, and how these two plans overlap.

Download Template

Fill the form below to download this template

Thank for you submitting the information.

Click below to download template.

Calculating Stripe fees for customer payments is easy with our calculator. Enter the payment amount to calculate Stripe's transaction fees and what you should charge to receive the full amount.

Our calculations are based on Stripe's per-transaction fees of 2.9% plus $0.30.

Calculate how much you’ll pay in Square fees for online, in-person, and manually-entered payments.

Enter your loan information to get an estimated breakdown of how much you'll pay over the lifetime of your loan.

PayPal fees can be confusing. Our calculator helps you understand how much you’ll pay in fees for common transaction methods.

he upheaval of the past few years has illustrated how important it is for businesses to prepare for all types of unexpected events. Natural disasters, public health emergencies, and malware can all potentially interrupt your business operations. While you can’t always prevent these types of disruptions, you can minimize their impact by developing strategic plans to keep your core business functions going even under adverse circumstances.

Business continuity and disaster recovery are terms that people often use interchangeably when discussing preparedness. However—while there is an overlap between the two ideas—each one addresses different aspects of handling business disruptions. This guide outlines the similarities and differences in business continuity vs. disaster recovery so you can develop a plan for both.

What is business continuity?

A business continuity plan outlines how you can keep your business running during a disaster or disruption. It’s not a plan to fix the underlying cause; instead, it’s focused on staying open so you can continue serving customers and generating revenue .

The pandemic disrupted business on a massive scale. Businesses that adjusted quickly were able to pivot and come out on the other side more resilient and profitable . Milwaukee Food and Tours temporarily changed its business model from offering in-person tours to delivering customized gift baskets, for example. Innovative Fitness made the shift from offering personal training in gyms to online sessions that focused on working out at home.

What is disaster recovery?

A disaster recovery plan outlines how you can identify and fix the source of the emergency. In some cases, such as a pandemic or hurricane, you can’t address the underlying cause alone. In others, such as a bug in your codebase, your internal team can fix it. Either way, you should have a plan in place to deal with elements that are within your control.

Cyberattacks are the most likely type of disaster modern businesses will face. Although you can and should take steps to protect your IT systems and data, even large corporations with almost-unlimited resources such as Microsoft experience cyberattacks. A business disaster recovery plan will help you mitigate the damage from all types of disasters, regardless of what caused them.

Key differences between business continuity and disaster recovery

It’s easy to mix up business continuity and disaster recovery plans because they’re both implemented in the event of a business catastrophe. However, understanding the differences between them will help you create more effective plans.

A business continuity plan prioritizes staying open for business and minimizing the impact of the disaster on daily business operations. A disaster recovery plan prioritizes dealing with the disaster itself and getting your systems back to their baseline as soon as possible.

A business continuity plan goes into effect as soon as you realize your business is going to be affected by a critical event. Your continuity plan comes first. The disaster recovery plan will come later, usually after the emergency has passed.

Business continuity is broader in scope than disaster recovery. It includes all factors that contribute to running your business, from back-end components such as your supply chain to front-end considerations such as staffing. A disaster recovery plan is more narrowly focused on restoring the elements that were damaged, such as your data and IT systems.

How a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan overlap

Despite their differences, there are also many ways that continuity and disaster recovery plans overlap. Understanding how they overlap can help you save time when you’re creating them. A business continuity plan should include your disaster recovery plan since it’s a comprehensive plan for responding to all aspects of business disruption.

Both plans require proactive risk analysis to identify potential threats and how they'll impact your business operations. You’ll also need to detail roles, policies, and procedures for both. Once you’ve implemented your plans, they need to be regularly evaluated and tested.

What to include in a business continuity plan

Your business continuity plan will be unique to the needs of your business. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. However, there are some elements that should be included in every business continuity plan .

Administrative details

The first part of your plan should include the purpose and objective of your plan as well as a detailed breakdown of your timeline and budget.

The governance section includes the names, roles, and contact information for everyone on the business continuity team. Outline who is responsible for what and whom each team member is accountable to.

Risk analysis and impact

This section will require research into the types of disasters that may occur in your industry or geographic location. While you’ll want to flesh out more common crises such as a cyberattack or banking fraud , you should also think about how rare events, such as a pandemic, could affect your business. Consider how each one could interfere with business operations, including what areas will be impacted.

Preventive and responsive strategies and procedures

Building on your risk analysis, you’ll be able to determine what your preventive and responsive strategies should be. Simply being aware of the possibilities may help you implement strategies that can prevent some types of disasters. For example, nearly 73% of small businesses in the U.S. have experienced a cyberattack. Cybersecurity awareness training can help your staff avoid falling for the most common types of cyberattacks and head off a catastrophe.

However, there’s no way to prevent all disasters, so you need to include detailed procedures for responding to and recovering from crises when they do occur.

Training and testing

Include a section that covers how you’ll train your staff and test your plan. Training plans should be tailored to each role. Your response team will need more detailed training, but everyone should receive basic disaster preparedness training.

Your plan should also include testing scenarios, from tabletop exercises to full-scale drills. As part of your testing procedures, evaluate your response and incorporate your insights into your plan.

What to include in a disaster recovery plan

Your disaster recovery plan is part of the responsive procedures included in your business continuity plan. It should be focused on identifying what elements of your business—particularly IT resources—will need to be restored in the event of a crisis and the procedures for doing so. It should include the following elements:

• A comprehensive list of all your IT assets, including data backups
• Your top-priority resources that need to be restored first
• Procedures for restoring critical systems
• Backup plans and procedures
• Training and testing plans

Planning for how your business will deal with unexpected emergencies can help you recover quickly and stay in business longer. Hopefully, you’ll never need to use your plans, but in today’s turbulent business landscape, it’s better to be prepared. One critical aspect of emergency planning is having backups for all of your critical data.

Using Novo’s cloud-based business banking solution means you’ll always have access to your important financial information no matter what happens. Sign up today to get started.

Novo is a fintech, and not a bank. Novo acts as a service provider to Middlesex Federal Savings, F.A., and the deposit and banking products obtained through the Novo platform are provided by Middlesex Federal Savings, F.A.

Novo Platform Inc. strives to provide accurate information but cannot guarantee that this content is correct, complete, or up-to-date. This page is for informational purposes only and is not financial or legal advice nor an endorsement of any third-party products or services. All products and services are presented without warranty. Novo Platform Inc. does not provide any financial or legal advice, and you should consult your own financial, legal, or tax advisors.

All-in-one money management

Take your business to new heights with faster cash flow and clear financial insights —all with a free Novo account. Apply in 10 minutes .

Why Your Startup Could Benefit from an Accelerator

Why should you convert your sole proprietorship to an llc, overdue invoice how to ask for payment professionally (with examples), spend less time managing your finances.

Take your business to new heights with faster cash flow and clear financial insights—all with a free Novo account. Apply online in 10 minutes.

More Articles On 

Operating a business, financial freedom for entrepreneurs: exploring modern banking solutions, the right way to pay yourself as a business owner, what business owners need to know about beneficial ownership information reporting.

• Pricing Overview
• CrashPlan Essential
• CrashPlan Professional
• CrashPlan Enterprise
• CrashPlan for MSPs
• Ransomware Recovery
• Device Migration
• Disaster Recovery
• State and Local
• Financial Services
• Research & Development
• Technology & Media
• Business Services
• Our Partners
• Become a Reseller
• Become an MSP Partner
• Become an Affiliate
• Resources Overview
• Security and Compliance

Business continuity vs disaster recovery: The difference explained

If you’re in IT, you’ve definitely heard business continuity plans (BCP) and disaster recovery plans (DRP) mentioned together. Sometimes, these two are merged into one acronym spelled out as “BCDR”. And while BCP and DRP are closely related, they solve for fundamentally distinct issues.

Before defining their differences, it’s vital to understand just how important a role BCP and DRP play in an organization. Specifically, BCP and DRP help an organization continue operating. Disruptions in business are inevitable. Without a plan, the core functions of the business cannot run smoothly, and this can impact the bottom line.

For instance, when natural disasters strike small to medium businesses, many are never able to recover. Even if they initially recover, 25% of SMBs are out of business within a year following a disaster. And the number of costly disasters is only increasing. NOAA (National Centers for Environmental Information) reports that in the last five years, the number of billion-plus dollar disasters (adjusted for inflation) in the United States has increased to an average of 17.8 events per year , whereas the average between 1980-2022 was just 7.9 events per year.

Today we’ll examine the Venn diagram between BCP and DRP; how they complement each other, overlap, and combine to help protect a business from significant disruption during disasters.

Let’s dive in.

What Is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan spells out how an organization will continue to run while experiencing a disaster or major disruption. These can include things like natural disasters, data breaches, strong economic downturns, hardware failures, and human errors. The core goal of a business continuity plan is to keep the business’ core functions operational throughout the disruption.

A business continuity plan is tailored to the specific needs of your organization. However, the components listed below comprise the core of a strong plan.

Identification of critical business processes and resources

What are your business’ major functions? What resources are necessary to maintain those functions? Which processes should take precedence when a disaster occurs?

For example, if your firm is a food processing organization, some of the critical business processes could include:

• Sourcing raw materials
• Manufacturing products
• Inspecting products for safety
• Delivering finished products to retail stores and customers
• Employee management and payroll

 Establish roles for participants and stakeholders

Another important component is a clause spelling out stakeholders and their roles. Knowing who’s responsible for what in times of disruption ensures a business runs smoothly throughout a disaster.

• An emergency preparedness manager is responsible for ensuring employees and customers are safe.
• An emergency management director develops and carries out the plan for the business to follow
• A disaster program manager is responsible for organizing other services, including shelters or triage centers.
• A large business may want to put together a committee of individuals responsible for different areas of the organization including technology and communication.

Detailed documentation

Every bit of data and workflow needs to be detailed and recorded in the BCP. When a disaster strikes, your organization will know exactly what to do and in which order since there’s a recorded blueprint decided upon beforehand. At minimum, evacuation policies need to be documented, contact lists need to be created and the participants and stakeholders listed above need to create plans for their areas of responsibility. If hazardous materials are at play, a separate plan needs to be made for handling. Disasters are chaotic; a documented plan helps make them less so. After a decision is made, write it down and store it somewhere that everyone knows about and can access.

Business impact analysis

What will the organization lose when a certain disruption strikes? For example, one cybersecurity report estimates small businesses lose almost  $8,600 an hour  during unplanned downtime, so being able to  protect your business from downtime  is paramount.

What specific losses will the organization incur? Organizations are faced with losses including declines to output and revenue, harmed reputation, impact of client or customer wellbeing, disruption to flow or delivery of services.

Defined (and documented) RTO and RPO

The recovery time objective (RTO) details how long systems, processes, or data can be impacted  without fatally affecting a business. For instance, if your RTO is 3 hours, operations must be running again within 3 hours of a disaster.

Conversely, the recovery point objective (RPO) outlines how much data an organization is willing to lose during a disruption. For example, if an enterprise’s RPO is 15 minutes, the organization must have a data backup every 15 minutes to achieve the RPO goal.

When creating your BCP, you’ll need to set the RTO and define the RPO. The goal of both is to minimize the chances of data loss and speed up the resumption of operations. But, it is not possible to have zero downtime or zero data loss. RPO and RTO can’t be based on hope or idealism but have to be based on what is realistically achievable (in terms of feasibility and cost), balanced with what is critical for business viability.

Testing in advance of actual disruption

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy” so… it’s probably best if that first encounter happens in testing. You will not be able to control for every eventuality but, the more you test and prepare the smaller your risk surface is. That’s why it’s critical to test how your plan holds up during a simulated disaster. Unfortunately,  23% of organizations never test their BCP or DRP . Don’t be one of those 23%; please.

There are a few ways to test your BCP. First, you can create a checklist. Second, walk through the exercises. And third, you can produce simulations and ensure your plan is built to protect your organization to the fullest.

A BCP test seeks to find out the following:

• If the plan works when disaster strikes
• Gaps and opportunities within the plan
• Whether the business can meet its RTO and RPO goals
• Whether the emergency communication plan will be effective

Testing your plan simulating the disruptions most likely to affect your organization is crucial. Data breaches or loss, human error, climate disasters, hardware failure, and power outages are common disruptions to test in advance.

Testing should happen once per year, and a commonly employed mechanism to do so is a  tabletop exercise .

What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan is detailed documentation showing how a business can quickly recover operations after an unplanned incident. For example, a data breach disaster recovery plan might include how it will restore data access and IT infrastructure after the breach. Even though they are often used interchangeably the DRP is usually a component of the business’ larger BCP. Every disaster requires continuity but not every continuity issue is as the result of a disaster. 

The main objectives of the DRP include the following:

• Keep infrastructure and human resources safe
• Guarantee continued business operations
• Minimize financial losses
• Protect organizational data
• Prevent reputation loss
• Limit liability

Below are the most vital components of the disaster recovery plan:

• A summary of critical processes, resources, and systems
• Stakeholders responsible for these processes, resources, and systems
• Detailed steps to recover, restart, and reconfigure the critical processes and systems
• RTO and RPO
• Any other emergency and mitigation steps that are essential to recovering after a disaster

Before creating the disaster recovery plan , you’ll need to conduct a disaster impact analysis and document risks associated with respective disasters. Doing so helps you identify which resources are needed where and how long it will take to bounce back.

How are BCP and DRP Similar?

BCP and DRP both work to ensure that an organization’s core functions are not hindered in times of disaster. They take a proactive approach to protect the organization and minimize loss during disasters. When creating both plans, you’ll need to account for business critical processes, systems, and resources. You’ll also need to define the RTO and the RPO when creating both plans. Another essential overlap between the two is the need for impact analysis and testing before making the plan official.

Finally, neither plan is set in stone. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans require constant review to align with changes in IT infrastructure, organizational goals, and existing threats.

How Do BCP and DRP Differ?

BCP and DRP complement each other and overlap during planning, but they have different functions. For starters, the business continuity plan is typically focused on organization-wide strategic planning. A disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, details how an organization can continue to run specifically during or after a disaster.

A BCP broadly covers every necessary detail, including the resources, processes, IT systems, and stakeholders across the business and covers a variety of issues which a business may face (including things like succession planning). More importantly, the BCP outlines step-by-step what needs to happen during and after a certain disaster.

A disaster recovery plan is a fundamental part of the business continuity plan. Often the DRP focuses on IT and how an organization will recover or restore IT infrastructure, applications, and systems critical to business operations following a disaster (physical, cyber, natural etc).

Put simply: the key difference is that the DRP assumes something has already happened, while the BCP includes components intended to prevent issues in the first place.

Be Ready with CrashPlan

Disaster and disruptions don’t discriminate based on whether you’re a small business or an enterprise. If disaster strikes and you’re not prepared, you risk heavy financial loss, damaged reputation, and potential liability.

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans add a layer of protection for when disasters occur. They’re a proactive approach to ensure you’re minimally impacted by disruption. Data recovery is a critical piece of this puzzle; how can your operations continue after a disaster without access to your data?

CrashPlan’s automatic cloud backup gives you immediate, easy access to endpoint data after hardware failure, natural disasters, data breaches, or any other calamity.

Find out today how CrashPlan helps you safeguard and access your organization’s data during disasters.

9 Point disaster recovery plan checklist

How to create a disaster recovery plan (DRP)

Cybersecurity: disaster recovery planning to protect your business from ransomware.

The complete guide to disaster recovery planning (DRP)

CrashPlan® provides peace of mind through secure, scalable, and straightforward endpoint data backup. We help organizations recover from any worst-case scenario, whether it is a disaster, simple human error, a stolen laptop, ransomware or an as-of-yet undiscovered calamity.

• Become a Partner

© 2024 CrashPlan® All rights reserved.

Privacy | Legal | Cookie Notice | Free Trial

• Search OnSolve

Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery: 5 Key Differences and the BC/DR Relationship

Business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) are easily confused terms. They seem almost interchangeable, but they’re not quite the same functions. Disaster recovery is actually a part of business continuity and involves a plan for getting business back to normal after a disaster occurs. Business continuity involves a wider breadth of planning and encompasses plans for keeping a business running during and following a disaster or disruption of any kind.

Every organization should have both a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan in place before disaster strikes, in order to keep everything functioning as smoothly as possible with minimal disruption for stakeholders. Let’s review five differences between business continuity and disaster recovery while looking into ways the two are interrelated.

A key difference between business continuity and disaster recovery is business continuity is wider in scope, encompassing all business functions necessary to keep the organization running, regardless of what kind of crisis arises. Disaster recovery has a narrower scope, focusing on systems impacted by a disaster that need to be recovered or replaced for an organization to get back up and running.

Whereas business continuity includes strategies to maintain all essential business functions, from supply and delivery chains to human resources and operations, disaster recovery focuses specifically on restoring any adversely affected business functions. For example, a business continuity plan would likely include a strategy for maintaining operations in the event of a cyber attack , while a disaster recovery plan would include steps for recovering any lost data and patching up vulnerabilities to return to business as usual. 

Another key difference between business continuity and disaster recovery is the timeline during which you would implement each set of plans. Business continuity plans are set in motion the moment a crisis occurs and sustained during and after the crisis. In the case of a pandemic , you would implement your continuity plan when it becomes likely your stakeholders are going to be impacted by an outbreak. You would continue to employ any continuity measures, such as working from home and sourcing from backup vendors, until the threat has completely subsided. 

Disaster recovery plans are set in motion after an emergency event is over, and these plans are sustained until business has returned to some semblance of normal. In a pandemic scenario, an organization might begin implementing a disaster recovery plan, which could include bringing employees back to the office, once case numbers dropped significantly and the threat of contagion was minimal.

3. Plan Components

The key components of business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans also vary. When creating a business continuity plan , you should take the following general steps:

• Form a continuity planning team
• Perform a business impact analysis
• Design and implement your plan
• Train and educate your employees
• Regularly assess and evaluate your plan

As you’re putting together a business continuity plan, you’ll want to create a list of all critical business functions and consider how a variety of different crisis scenarios could disrupt each of them. Once you have identified potential vulnerabilities, brainstorm strategies for maintaining those functions during a crisis.

For example, if you realize your organization is relying heavily on one or two suppliers, consider diversifying or creating a list of backup vendors. You should also earmark the resources you’ll need in likely crisis scenarios, train personnel to carry out the plan and implement software to enable communication in the midst of a crisis. Your organization must be able to maintain communication with all stakeholders before, during and following a crisis. An emergency mass notification system is often the best solution.

When creating a disaster response plan, you’ll likely take the following general steps:

• Form a disaster recovery team
• Identify critical functions and potential disaster risks
• Design and implement a disaster recovery plan
• Create backup procedures (in case of cyber attack)
• Train personnel
• Regularly test and maintain the plan

When preparing your disaster recovery plan, key proactive steps include conducting a business impact analysis and figuring out how you’ll restore data, critical applications and business operations after you’ve been hit with a disaster or emergency.

4. Processes and Actions

Once you’ve created business continuity and disaster recovery plans, the actions taken to implement each plan will differ.

If your organization is faced with a threat to business continuity, your continuity planning team will take actions appropriate for the specific scenario. In the event of a hurricane, for example, those actions might include:

• Alerting all stakeholders to the threat
• Advising employees on emergency procedures and points of contact
• Transitioning to alternative operations, whether that’s a backup workspace or remote work
• Maintaining internal network infrastructure
• Checking in with all employees to ensure safety and administer assistance, if necessary
• Adjusting supply chains if vendors or partners have been affected
• Communicating any changes with customers and other stakeholders

Once a crisis has subsided, actions taken toward disaster recovery will include any steps necessary to return to normal. In the case of a hurricane, those actions might include:

• Assisting any employees who have been directly affected by the storm
• Rebuilding or restoring any damaged company property
• Restoring or recovering any lost data or company systems
• Welcoming employees back into the workplace once it’s safe
• Bringing production levels back up to normal

Processes and actions taken to maintain business continuity and ensure disaster recovery will depend on the specific crisis, which is why it’s important to consider a variety of scenarios when forming your organizational plans.

5. Stakeholders Involved

The stakeholders involved in business continuity and disaster recovery will overlap substantially, but there are slight differences.

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.

The Importance of Communications in Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

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 communications. Your teams should have a plan in place for sharing relevant information with your stakeholders throughout a crisis. Timeliness is critical in any critical event. You’ll want to make sure you can quickly send and receive important information. 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. Your organization’s continuity plan should include a disaster recovery plan, and the various team members in charge of each aspect of both plans must work together and be on the same page before, during and after a crisis.

To learn more about how to improve your business continuity and disaster recovery plans, check out our ebook, 4 Misconceptions of Business Continuity Communications (and How to Fix Them) .

Learn why dynamic risk demands a proactive approach.

Share this article:

OnSolve® proactively mitigates physical threats, allowing organizations to remain agile when a crisis strikes. Using trusted expertise and reliable AI-powered risk intelligence, critical communications and incident management technology, the OnSolve Platform allows organizations to detect, anticipate and mitigate physical threats that impact their people and operations.

Mitigate Risk and Strengthen Organizational Resilience Today

Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery: What Is The Difference?

Bonus material: free bcp checklist.

Table of Contents

Introduction

When comparing business continuity vs disaster recovery, it can be hard to understand the differences between the two. This guide will explain their key differentiators.

When you think of a superhero, the first image that comes to mind is probably someone wearing a mask and cape, flying around a dystopian city and battling evil. Superheroes possess unique abilities beyond the average human, allowing them to protect those around them and help the world become a better place. These comic book and movie characters, while it’s true that they’re ultimately fictional characters, are all – to some extent – based in reality. Humans may not be able to fly or shoot spider webs out of their hands, but there are people in the real world who embody the same morally righteous and benevolent qualities of a superhero and dedicate their lives to defending the greater good.

Here at LogicManager, we believe that risk managers are the superheroes of their organizations. When calamity strikes, they’re the ones swooping in to get the business back up and running as quickly as possible; they don’t have the option to shy away from disaster.

Forward-thinking professionals focus on business continuity planning (BCP) and disaster recovery (DR) to serve as roadmaps to navigate their way out of difficult circumstances and ensure that recovery can happen faster.

This guide will explain the key differentiators when comparing business continuity vs disaster recovery. It’ll also delve into options for implementing business solutions so that you’re equipped with action items for improving your organization’s business processes.

What is Business Continuity?: Overview

We should think of business continuity as the first line of defense against any challenge that threatens the core functionalities of an organization’s business operations.

Planning for business continuity means taking the necessary steps to ensure that your business can continue to operate uninterrupted despite disaster. It also aims to reduce recovery time, or the time it takes to get things up and running as usual again.

Unforeseen Events

An unforeseen event is exactly what it sounds like: an event that you did not see coming. It’s a common term used amongst insurance agents and lawyers because when these events occur, people turn to them for financial help; by nature, the event was unforeseen, so many don’t have enough cash to cover the resulting damage upfront. It’s important to actively invest time and energy into preparing for any potentially negative event before it happens so that if or when it does, you have a plan in place and the necessary resources to return to business as usual.

Examples of Unforeseen Events

Historically, unforeseen events include things like:

• Natural disasters
• Winning the lottery
• Receiving a life-threatening diagnosis
• Getting in an accident
• A threat to national security, such as a terrorist attack
• Collapse of infrastructure
• And perhaps the most timely example of all, a pandemic ( see our complete guide covering BCP for Covid 19 ).

The fact that there are historical examples of these events means that they are not completely unforeseen, but rather predictable when you truly take a risk-based approach to business continuity. As you can tell, business continuity planning is critical when managing your business.

Unforeseen events that pose a direct threat to business continuity include:

• The sudden unavailability of a key vendor-provided service
• A regional power outage
• Abandonment in leadership
• Data protection issues
• Supply chain issues
• Privacy policy issues
• Getting sued
• An industry strike
• Pest infestation

Ideally, a business continuity plan provides things like access to critical data backup, a safe place for employees to work, instructions for connecting to offsite systems, servers, applications, and anything else that can help prevent an organization from going offline and suffering revenue loss.

What is Disaster Recovery?: Overview

Disaster recovery refers to getting those systems, servers, and applications up and running following – you guessed it – disaster. “Disaster” includes but is not limited to all of the threats listed above. From a data security standpoint, there are additional threats that may not trigger a BCP but instead trigger a disaster recovery plan (DRP), such as:

• A cyber or data protection breach
• Server, network, or system failure
• Device failure
• Lack of employee training

Maintaining a comprehensive DRP is essential to functioning properly after a catastrophic event. The main focus of disaster recovery planning should be minimizing the time it takes to recover. The quicker you can recover, the quicker your organization can begin functioning normally again following disaster. An example of a control included in your DRP may be having a solid data backup in the event of a breach to recover business data.

That way, with disaster recovery planning, the backup systems will enable your business to get up and running faster.

The main difference between business continuity and disaster recovery is the timing of the plan. For example, in the case of business continuity planning, you would create a plan before or during an event and try to focus on keeping operations as normal as possible. However, disaster recovery planning completely focuses on the response to a specific event with the ultimate aim to create disaster recovery plans which get operations back to normal.

Unlike a BCP, a disaster recovery plan focuses on restoring IT infrastructure and accessing copies of data stored offsite at a data center without focusing too much on getting the business as a whole back up and running during the crisis itself. We can think of a DRP as a subset of the BCP. Ultimately, it is equally important for all employees at an organization to know exactly how to react if either risk management plan is put in place and the effect that this may have on business operations.

Companies may choose to focus on either crafting a BCP or DRP, subscribing to one mentality over the other. To be completely prepared, it’s essential to have both a comprehensive BCP and DRP in place to ensure complete coverage from the unthinkable.

Product Solutions

Without the right cloud-based software, constructing your business continuity plan can be extremely difficult and time-consuming. Some of the challenges you may face include:

• Difficulty accessing important information due to tracking via traditional spreadsheets or word documents that make shared access and updates a challenge on business operations
• Exerting an unnecessary amount of effort identifying and engaging the critical business units in a disaster recovery plan because you’re lacking an integrated solution
• An inability to identify gaps in your BCP/ DRP because of unseen factors or information and siloed processes
• Following disaster, lacking a dedicated area to document and respond to incidents for centralized trending

LogicManager Software For Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

• Easily access, review and update all of your BC/DR information, like business processes and related assets, in one centralized framework
• Link risks and controls directly to the business continuity plan that they relate to using our taxonomy technology
• Manage your responsibilities and track the status of your projects with easily accessible to-do lists to ensure that you have a solid plan in place
• Evaluate the criticality of each business process with pre-built, intuitive business impact analysis (BIA) templates
• Improve coordination with automated tasks, alerts, and reminders
• Easily track disaster events when they occur, identify the gaps in your business continuity plans and determine follow-up improvements to your procedures with our intuitive incident templates
• Ensure the BCP or DRP you have in place is operational and effective with automated testing to prepare in the event of a disaster so that emergency management is in place
• Prove BC/DR compliance to auditors and effectiveness to senior management with highly configurable reports for internal and external stakeholders and compliance checklists
• And much more

In Summary: Has Your Company Thought About Business Continuity Planning & Disaster Recovery Planning?

As a risk manager, you need to know which business functions are the most critical so that you can plan recovery better in your business. You need to identify the resources employees use to keep crucial processes functioning, and you need to have business continuity and disaster recovery steps outlined to get those critical business processes and resources back online should havoc come to visit.

However, superheroes are only as good as their sidekicks. With LogicManager’s cloud-based business continuity planning software as your sidekick, you’ll be equipped with a BCP toolkit suited to your needs, so that you can apply best practices to your business and ultimately take on any challenges that come your way.

My Favorites List

Submit your Favorites List and our experts will reach out to you with more information. You will also receive this list as an e-mail which you can share with others. Here are the solutions you've added to your list so far:

• (888) 244-1912
• [email protected]

• Understanding Business Continuity vs BDR: A Guide
• About Invenio IT
• Business Continuity

What’s the difference b/w disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan? (w/ examples)

Dale Shulmistra

• November 3, 2022

People often use the terms disaster recovery and business continuity planning interchangeably, but while these two terms are similar, they describe two  different approaches businesses take to bounce back in the event of a disaster .

So what is the difference between a disaster recovery plan and  business continuity  plan? The answer varies a little depending on who you ask, but the basic rule of thumb is this:

A business continuity plan is focused on all aspects of disaster planning as it relates to preventing an interruption to business operations. A disaster recovery plan is focused more specifically on the response and recovery stages of a disaster, especially in regards to IT systems.

To further differentiate these concepts, let’s look at each plan individually:

• A  business continuity plan  (BCP) refers to a series of protocols designed to ensure the business can continue operating during a disruptive event. In simplest terms, a BCP aims to answer the question: “How can we keep the business running if disaster strikes?”
• A  disaster recovery plan  (DRP) refers more specifically to the steps and technologies for recovering from a disruptive event, especially as it pertains to restoring lost data, resolving infrastructure failure or troubleshooting other technological components. This plan aims to answer the question: “How do we recover from a disaster?”

According to Dell, a business continuity plan is a strategy that businesses put in place to continue operating with minimal disruption in the event of a disaster. A disaster recovery plan is more specific. It’s a plan to “restore the data and applications that run your business should your data center, servers or other infrastructure get damaged or destroyed.”

Below, we dig a little deeper into the unique components of each plan and how they differ, but first, let’s talk about why they’re essential in the first place.

Why are a DRP and BCP Important?

Businesses face a wide variety of threats that can impede their ability to function. These could result from natural disasters like fires, floods, tornados, earthquakes or hurricanes. There are also many man-made threats, like malware, cyberattacks, ransomware, accidental data deletion or even internal sabotage. Without both a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan in place, businesses face the dire consequences of being ill-prepared when disaster strikes.

Research shows that half of all businesses that experience a major disaster “never return to the marketplace.” Of businesses that are involved in a major fire, 70 percent “fail within 3 years.”

The stakes are especially high for small businesses. According to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency),  90% of smaller companies fail within one year after a disaster  if they’re unable to resume operations within 5 days. Without detailed plans for preparing for such a disaster, businesses are setting themselves up for failure.

By focusing on both business continuity and disaster recovery planning, you can ensure your business can withstand these challenges.

Alarming Statistics about the Need for Disaster Planning

The rates of business failure are especially high for businesses that do not have a business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan. Consider some of these alarming  business continuity statistics :

• Operational downtime can cost as much as $10,000 per hour for small businesses, according to estimates from BC/DR provider Datto. For larger companies, this downtime can cost millions of dollars per hour.
• In a broad survey of businesses conducted by DataCore, more than half of businesses reported they had recently experienced a downtime event lasting at least 8 hours.
• More than  200,000 businesses in the U.S. were forced to close  due to disruptions from Covid-19 – a prime example of the impact that a large, unexpected disaster (such as a pandemic) can have on businesses that have not planned for such incidents.

How a Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan Overlap

In reality, both plans are referred to generally when describing a business’s disaster preparedness, whether for prevention or response or both.

But also, it’s important to remember that a comprehensive business continuity plan will actually have a disaster recovery plan built into it. Your BCP is a master document that should encompass all aspects of a company’s disaster prevention, mitigation and response, including the recovery protocols (whether tech-focused or not). You cannot have an effective business continuity plan without addressing how the business will recover from different kinds of disasters.

Confused? Don’t be. Let’s take a closer look at each plan.

Business Continuity Planning

A business continuity plan is a broad plan to keep a business up and running in the event of a disaster. It focuses on the business as a whole, but also drills down to very specific scenarios that create risks for operations.

With business continuity planning, generally speaking, you’re focusing on the critical operations that the business needs to get up and running again after a disruption in order to conduct regular business. If the plan is followed correctly, businesses should be able to continue to provide services to customers during or immediately after a disaster with minimal disruption. The plan also focuses on the needs of business partners and vendors.

A business continuity plan is a written document that lists the business’s essential functions. According to TechTarget, these are things like a list of critical supplies, employee contact information, a list of crucial business functions or copies of important records. Basically, the business continuity plan includes all the necessary information to get the business up and running as soon as possible after a disruptive event.

But even that is only one small component of a BCP, as we address below.  

Disaster Recovery Planning

A disaster recovery plan can be considered a more focused, specific part of a business continuity plan.

Depending on who you talk to, a disaster recovery plan is sometimes narrowly focused on a business’s data and information systems. According to  Data Center Knowledge , for example, a disaster recovery plan is designed to save “data with the sole purpose of being able to recover it in the event of a disaster.” For this reason, disaster recovery planning is usually focused on the needs of the IT department.

Depending on the type of disaster, the plan could involve everything from recovering a small data set to the loss of an entire datacenter. Since most businesses are increasingly reliant on information technology, the disaster recovery plan is an important part of business continuity planning.

A disaster recovery plan can also refer to protocols that are outside the realm of IT. For example, the plan could include steps for recovery personnel to seek a secondary business location to resume critical operations. Or, it could include guidance for how to restore communication between emergency staff if primary lines of communication are unavailable.

In other words, disaster recovery planning does not always have to be strictly IT-focused, though it often is. If your IT personnel are creating an IT-focused disaster recovery plan, just be sure that all non-IT recovery protocols are included within the larger BCP documentation.

What to Include in a Business Continuity Plan

Your BCP should serve as the single, multifaceted document for managing all ends of disaster preparedness at your organization:

• Prevention : Steps and systems to prevent certain disasters from occurring in the first place.
• Mitigation : Processes to limit the impact of disasters when they occur.
• Recovery : Protocols for restoring operations as quickly as possible to limit downtime or other adverse consequences.

These are broad categories that need to be defined individually for each possible disaster scenario. To do so, you need to gain a better understanding of the unique risks that pose a threat to your organization and how those events will impact the business in terms of downtime, costs, reputation damage and so on.

As such, a typical business continuity plan will usually require the following sections:

• Contact information : Contact details for those who developed the BCP, and/or key recovery personnel within each department.
• Plan objectives : The overall objective for the plan, i.e. its purpose and overall goal – what it aims to accomplish, why it’s critical, what areas it focuses on, etc.
• Risk assessment : A thorough assessment of disaster scenarios that could disrupt operations, prioritized by likelihood and/or severity of impact.
• Impact analysis : Specific outcomes for each disaster scenario in terms of how much they negatively impact the business, i.e. the costs for idle workers, recovery costs, hardware damage and repair, etc.
• Prevention : Steps and systems for preventing each of those disasters, such as the implementation of antimalware systems to prevent certain cyberattacks.
• Response : How the business should respond to each disaster to minimize impact and initiate a rapid recovery, such as restoring backups after a data loss.
• Areas for improvement : Any weaknesses identified in the creation of the BCP, along with recommended solutions and steps for filling these holes. (Your BCP is an evolving document that should be updated periodically to reassess risks and incorporate any changes made.)
• Contingencies : A list of secondary backup assets and/or protocols, such as a backup office location, backup equipment and so on.
• Communication : Protocols for staying in communication with recovery personnel and/or all personnel at large, such as a text alert system, company extranet, calling trees, etc.

What to Include in a Disaster Recovery Plan

A disaster recovery plan is essentially the “Response” component of your business continuity plan. It encompasses all the procedures, technologies and objectives necessary for completing a quick recovery after a disaster. This recovery could pertain to lost data, damaged hardware, network outages, application failure or virtually any other point of failure across your operations.

Here are some things you’ll want to identify within your disaster recovery plan:

• Recovery technologies : All systems currently implemented (or those that should be) that support the recovery process. An example would be a  data backup and disaster recovery system  that enables you to recover critical files that have gone missing or large datasets that have been infected with ransomware.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) : Your RTO is a desired timeframe for completing recovery before things take a turn for the worse. It can be applied to the business as a whole or individual layers of IT, like data recovery. For example, an RTO of 30 minutes would mean that all data should be recovered or restored within 30 minutes after a loss is discovered.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) : RPO refers specifically to the age of data backups. It’s the desired recovery point for restoring data from a backup to minimize the amount of data loss. An example RPO might be 6 hours – meaning that your last backup would never be more than 6 hours old. So if your systems were suddenly infected with ransomware, the data you restore from a backup shouldn’t be more than 6 hours old. (Thus, a longer RPO, such as 24 hours, would create the risk of losing a lot more data.)
• Recovery protocols:  Who does what in a disaster situation? Your DRP should clearly define the roles of your recovery personnel, so that there is no confusion and not a minute wasted when disaster strikes. In the case of a data recovery, who oversees it? How, exactly, do they do it? Who do they communicate with, and how are updates communicated with other personnel? All of this should be spelled out to ensure that recovery teams know what to do and can refer back to this guidance when needed.
• Vendors, supplies & other third parties : These could be IT providers, telecommunications companies or other third parties that may be needed to support the recovery process. For example, in case of an Internet outage, your DRP should identify your Internet provider’s emergency contact information (ideally a specific point of contact) to ensure a faster resolution.
• Recovery testing : Periodic tests and mock disaster scenarios to confirm your recovery systems work as they should. One example could be a test data recovery to confirm that backups are available and can be restored without integrity issues.

Like your BCP, your disaster recovery plan should also be updated periodically to ensure all the information is still accurate.

Also, remember that the information in your DRP should be dictated in part by a thorough business analysis, like the risk assessments and impact analyses from your overall continuity planning. It is indeed important to understand the differences between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan, but perhaps even more important is understanding how these two documents hinge on each other and play a connected role in maintaining continuity.

Backup & Disaster Recovery

One of the best strategies in disaster recovery planning is to keep all of your data backed up on a server at a secondary site. This way, if a disaster occurs at the primary site, a backup of all vital data is available. A good disaster recovery plan will dictate how you manage and access data from the secondary site as quickly as possible.

For example, in the case of hybrid-cloud backup systems like the  Datto SIRIS , you have several recovery options available to you.  If a disaster occurs at the primary site, you can restore data from the cloud or boot the entire backup as a virtual machine. The virtualization method allows for instant access to data and applications while a full recovery is in process.

Ultimately, the reliability of your disaster recovery plan is dependent on everything you’ve included in the plan: all the infrastructure, processes, planning and testing.

Frequently Asked Questions

1) what’s the difference between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan.

The main difference is that a disaster recovery plan is more focused on the procedures for recovering from a disaster, especially in regards to IT systems, while a business continuity plan focuses on the bigger picture of preventing all operational disruptions.

Disaster recovery planning is typically considered a subset of business continuity planning.

2) Which comes first: business continuity or disaster recovery?

Business continuity planning is the foundation of a business’s disaster planning and thus should come before disaster recovery planning. Continuity planning will identify the primary threats to a business using a risk assessment and impact analysis. Those assessments can be used to inform IT disaster recovery planning.

3) What is an example of a business continuity strategy?

One example of a business continuity strategy is creating frequent data backups that can be restored in case files are deleted, destroyed or lost. This strategy involves using a dependable business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) system that enables frequent backups and prompt restore methods.

4) What is business continuity and disaster recovery?

Business continuity and disaster recovery (or BC/DR) refers to the systems and procedures that help a business continue operating through a disaster. The term is commonly used in reference to data backup and recovery systems, but it can apply to other IT systems as well.

Don’t Go without a Plan! Get the Protection You Need.

Being prepared for a disaster is one of the most important things a business can do to prevent costly downtime—or permanent closure—when these disruptive incidents occur. Get in touch with our experts at Invenio IT to explore the technology your organization needs for business continuity, data backup and disaster recovery.  Request a free demo  or contact our specialists at Invenio IT by calling (646) 395-1170 or by emailing  [email protected] .

Join 23,000+ readers in the Data Protection Forum

Related articles.

BCDR Faceoff: How Do Datto Competitors Stack Up? What are the Alternatives?

Do you know what makes Datto Encryption So Secure?

The Truth about All Datto SIRIS Models for BCDR

Where’s My Data? 411 on Datto Locations around the Globe

2023 Guide to Datto SaaS Protection for M365 and Google Workspace

Cybersecurity.

© 2023 InvenioIT. All rights reserved.

Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery – Understanding the difference

It can often be confusing when talking about business continuity vs disaster recovery.  Not only is there an overlap in between business continuity (BCP) and disaster recovery (DR), but these terms are often used interchangeably, which further adds to the confusion.

Simply put, the purpose of business continuity is to ensure that critical business functions work continuously with minimal downtime in case of disruption. On the other hand, disaster recovery aims to restore business processes as soon as possible.

Presented below is a detailed explanation of these terms, what they are, how they overlap, and what makes them distinct from one another.

On this page:

Understanding Business Continuity

What is disaster recovery, what is the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery, how do they work together – where business continuity and disaster recovery overlap, business continuity vs disaster recovery – does your business need one, or both, business continuity: risk management, business continuity planning: risk assessment, how to start disaster recovery 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. Effective business continuity plans can enable a business to get its systems back up and running promptly, limiting damage to your organizations’ productivity.  

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.e. the time taken to restore your data to new systems.  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.

Disaster recovery forms a part of your overall business continuity plan (BCP), a subset of your broader BCP, forming part of the “mitigate” and “recover” portion of your business continuity plan.

For example, in business continuity, you have to keep your processes functional during and after the event. On the other hand, disaster recovery focuses on how to return to normal when the event has been completed.

Business continuity aims to keep your business operational in the event of a disruption, enabling a return to full normal business operations after the end of the crisis.

BCP, or business continuity planning, focuses on preserving the functionality of the overall business, through continuous improvement in both internal and external operations, including the set up of preventative controls and management of customers and employees.

Disaster recovery aims to restore your operations and IT systems as quickly and efficiently as possible following a catastrophic incident. Disaster recovery includes the IT contingency methods and mechanisms, such as data backup, for your critical business applications and functions.

Disaster recovery planning aims to minimize business downtime, maintaining, where possible, access to your critical IT infrastructure and operations, such as data, hardware, software, networking equipment, power, and connectivity, to get your business back up and running.

Business continuity planning establishes the blueprint to enable you to maintain business processes and procedures as close to “business as usual”.  Disaster recovery planning, on the other hand, focuses on the tools and solutions needed to restore your affected technology and data.

While disaster recovery is a component of business continuity, there instances when disaster recovery plans can be activated without invoking your broader business continuity plan.

For example, if you experience a power outage, you will have a reliable disaster recovery plan in place, allowing you to failover to a secondary site and be back up and running with minimal disruption to your employees and customer. In such a scenario, your entire business continuity plan would not need to be activated.

Provided any incident has not impacted your data, IT systems or IT infrastructure, business continuity can be invoked independently of your disaster, in certain instances.

If, for example, your business is facing a public relations crisis, you may need to issue statements to both internal and external stakeholders, to come out of the crises. Since there is no impact on your IT infrastructure, only your business continuity plan will be activated.

Of course, as in the flood example given earlier, your business continuity and disaster recovery plans can overlap.

Having understood the differences in disaster recovery and business continuity, it now becomes clear that you need both .

Having a business continuity plan, without a disaster recovery element to it, will cause most businesses to scramble to try and fix the technology crucial to your business operations.

The lack of a disaster recovery strategy will take you longer to identify and implement a fix in the event of a catastrophic incident, significantly impacting your business.

On the other hand, while a disaster recovery strategy will enable you to fix and restore your technology and data quickly, the lack of a broader business continuity plan will hamper productivity and communication, severely impacting your ability to manage your teams proactively to ensure the maintenance of service, consistency, and recovery from a disaster.

Most of the time, business continuity risks are manageable. You can quickly identify natural disasters, but it’s not easy to identify cyber events. It depends on your business location; for example, your office or business is in an area where the risk of a hurricane is always there, so you can expect business interruptions from a hurricane.

You also need to take IT risks into account. DDoS attacks are on the rise, and these attacks cause servers to slow down or stop working. Regardless of the service you provide, these attacks can interrupt your business. So there should be a proper plan for risk identification and mitigation.

It is similar to other risk identification processes , and you need to understand the IT infrastructure. It would help if you considered the following questions.

• What software, systems, information, and networks are critical for maintaining business operations? How are all these connected?
• Which cyber attacks threaten this software, systems, and networks?
• How could natural disasters affect these systems?
• Which third-party vendors are critical for maintaining business operations?
• What action plans and measures are in place to prevent cyber risks to our software and systems?
• What measures are in place to prevent third-party vendors from affecting our business operations?
• Do we have a data encryption system in place for remote access in case of a business interruption?
• Do we have a data backup and recovery systems in place?
• Can we maintain the endpoint encryption in case of a business interruption?
• Is there a system to maintain emergency administrative authorization to keep business running?

All these questions can help in the risk identification process.

When you have created a risk list for potential software, system, network, and third-party outages, you need to establish a policy to recover from these interruptions and get back to normal. For disaster recovery planning, you need to consider the following questions:

• Do we have a detailed written plan and chain of command for recovering from these interruptions?
• Who will do the recovery tasks?
• Do we have any specific timeline for disaster recovery?
• Which documentation is required for full recovery?
• How to recover business data ?
• How to get back to normal operations once the event is over?
• How can we measure our compliance with user authorization policy?
• How to measure the efficiency of event response?
• How to document all the corrective actions?
• Is there any process to interview individuals involved in the process of disaster recovery?

These questions can help create a proper disaster recovery plan.

A disaster recovery plan provides assurances to the survival of your business, both during and after a disaster.  When formulating your disaster recovery plan, you should consider, and include both RTO and RPO, to ensure your business can recover effectively from a disaster.

Recovery time objective (rto) – helps to calculate how quickly your business needs to recover it infrastructure and services in the event of a disaster or incident to maintain business continuity., recovery point objective (rpo) – this is the maximum tolerable amount of data your business can ‘afford’ to lose. rpo is a useful metric for determining how often your business should perform data backups., for instance, you identify an rto of 4 hours for your business, and your systems are capable of a 2 hour restore time. consequently, it would be unnecessary to make a large investment in hardware/software to decrease the restore time to 1 hour, as the existing capability of a 2 hour restore time meets business needs..

• Understanding business continuity and crisis management
• Creating a business continuity plan
• Managing Technology Risks
• Why all organizations need a data breach response plan
• Using cloud computing to achieve business continuity
• How to perform a cybersecurity risk assessment

Lucy has more than 23 years of experience in the technology industry. Specialising in the cloud and telecommunications sectors, Lucy has previously worked in senior management roles within HR & Operations for major national and international organisations such as BT, O2 and more recently, Vodafone. Lucy is currently the Deputy Online Editor at BusinessTechWeekly.com

Configuring your Business Internet Services for the Best Performance

Understanding Backup Methods: Full vs Incremental vs Differential Backup

What is shoulder surfing?

10 of the best free malware removal tools

How to Set Up an Effective Marketing Automation System

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

What’s the difference between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

Sep 01, 2023

A business continuity plan (BCP) and a disaster recovery plan (DRP) are essential components of modern business resilience strategies , ensuring the resilience and survival of organizations in the face of unexpected disruptions. These plans fall under the broader umbrella of Business Continuity Management (BCM), a holistic approach to identifying potential risks and developing strategies to maintain essential operations.

The core distinction between business continuity vs disaster recovery plans lies in their scopes. A BCP encompasses an organization's strategy to manage and mitigate a wide range of potential risks that could disrupt normal operations. This includes not only technological disasters like data breaches or system failures but also factors such as natural disasters, supply chain interruptions, and even pandemics. On the other hand, a DRP primarily focuses on the recovery of IT systems and data after a disruptive event has occurred.

Both business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans are pivotal for organizational survival in today's complex and unpredictable business landscape. A comprehensive Business Continuity Management strategy incorporates these plans to address a range of risks, from minor disruptions to large-scale disasters. By doing so, businesses can minimize the impact of disruptions, maintain customer trust, and position themselves as resilient and reliable entities in their respective industries.

Business Continuity Plan Template

A business continuity plan (BCP) template serves as a structured framework that organizations can use to create a comprehensive strategy for maintaining essential operations during disruptions. This template outlines the key elements necessary to develop a robust plan, often in conjunction with a disaster recovery plan (DRP), to ensure the resilience of the business.

The template typically starts by defining the scope and objectives of the plan. It clarifies the purpose of the BCP, whether it's focused solely on IT systems or encompasses broader business functions. It also outlines the goals of the plan, such as minimizing downtime, preserving data integrity, and ensuring the safety of personnel.

A business continuity plan checklist is an integral part of the template. This checklist assists organizations in systematically identifying potential risks, evaluating their impact, and devising strategies to mitigate them. It covers various aspects, including risk assessment, business impact analysis, resource allocation, crisis communication, and alternative work arrangements. By following the checklist, organizations can ensure that no critical elements are overlooked.

Assessing business continuity risk assessment is the foundational step in creating a BCP. It involves identifying vulnerabilities, evaluating potential impacts, and devising strategies to minimize downtime and data loss. This preventive approach enables organizations to proactively handle challenges, reducing the severity of disruptions.

The template also provides guidance on creating a communication plan that outlines protocols for notifying stakeholders, employees, customers, and the public during a crisis. It includes strategies for maintaining operations remotely and relocating key functions if necessary.

While a business continuity plan template provides a standardized structure, its effectiveness lies in customization. Organizations must tailor the template to their specific needs, considering their industry, size, and unique operational requirements. The template should evolve with the organization, reflecting changes in technology, personnel, and potential risks.

A BCP template serves as a foundational tool in crafting a resilient strategy for navigating disruptions. It simplifies the process of developing a comprehensive plan that covers both business continuity and disaster recovery aspects. By adhering to a template and incorporating it into the organization's culture, businesses can enhance their preparedness and response capabilities, ensuring minimal downtime and preserving their reputation even in the face of unforeseen challenges.

How To Write A Business Continuity Plan

Writing a business continuity plan involves strategic thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and a deep understanding of your organization's operations. It's essential to involve representatives from various departments to ensure comprehensive coverage. Remember, the effectiveness of the plan lies not just in its creation, but also in its consistent testing, refinement, and integration into the organizational culture. By following these business continuity and disaster recovery plan steps and adopting a proactive approach, businesses can enhance their resilience and minimize the impact of unexpected events on their operations.

Initiation and Planning Phase. Begin by identifying key stakeholders who will be involved in developing and implementing the BCP. This phase involves defining the scope, objectives, and resources needed for the plan. Determine the risks your organization faces, ranging from IT failures to natural disasters.

Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Conduct a thorough analysis of potential risks and their potential impacts on various aspects of your business. This involves understanding the critical processes, systems, and data that are essential for ongoing operations. Assign priorities to each component based on their criticality.

Strategy Development Phase. Based on the risk assessment, formulate strategies to mitigate and manage risks. Design contingency plans for different scenarios, including communication strategies, resource allocation, and alternative work arrangements. Address both IT and non-IT aspects, covering personnel, facilities, and supply chains.

Implementation Phase. Define roles and responsibilities for each phase of the plan. Identify who is responsible for activating the plan, coordinating actions, and managing communications during a crisis. Ensure that all employees are aware of their roles and trained to execute them effectively.

Testing and Exercising Phase. Regularly test the BCP through tabletop exercises and simulations to identify gaps and refine the plan. These drills help teams understand their roles and responsibilities in a controlled environment and provide opportunities for improvement.

Maintenance and Review Phase. A BCP is not a static document. It should be regularly updated to reflect changes in the organization's structure, technology, and risks. Periodically review the plan to ensure its relevance and effectiveness.

Integration with Disaster Recovery Plan. While BCP focuses on maintaining overall business functions, the DRP specifically deals with IT systems and data recovery. Integrate the two plans to ensure a seamless response to both business and technological disruptions.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan for Information Security

A business continuity and disaster recovery plan for information security is a comprehensive strategy that organizations implement to safeguard their critical data, systems, and operations in the event of unexpected disruptions. This plan ensures the continuity of business processes while also addressing the unique challenges posed by cybersecurity threats.

For instance, consider a scenario where a cyberattack compromises an organization's IT infrastructure. In this case, a well-structured plan would encompass both BCDR aspects. The BC component would focus on maintaining essential business functions, possibly through alternate processes or manual workarounds, while the DR strategies would concentrate on restoring compromised systems and data integrity.

For information security, there are some similarities with a regular BCDR plan, with some important additions:

Risk Assessment and Impact Analysis. Identify potential cybersecurity risks and assess their potential impact on information assets, systems, and business operations. Determine the criticality of each system and data component.

Preventive Measures. Implement robust cybersecurity measures to minimize the risk of attacks, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and regular security audits.

Backup and Data Recovery. Establish regular data backup protocols and off-site storage to ensure the availability of crucial information in the event of data loss. Develop strategies for data recovery to restore systems to their pre-incident state.

Incident Response. Define clear incident response procedures to swiftly address and mitigate cyber incidents. Assign responsibilities for different phases of the response process, including containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned.

Communication Plan. Develop a communication strategy that outlines how information regarding cybersecurity incidents will be shared with internal stakeholders, external partners, and the public to maintain transparency and manage reputational risks.

Testing and Training. Regularly test the plan through simulations and tabletop exercises to identify gaps and refine procedures. Provide training to employees to ensure they understand their roles during a cybersecurity incident.

Disaster Recovery vs High Availability. Another comparison lies between disaster recovery and high availability (HA). HA focuses on minimizing downtime and ensuring continuous access to critical systems, often through redundancy and failover mechanisms. While HA is a component of DRP, the latter involves a more comprehensive approach, encompassing not just availability but also data integrity and restoration after a crisis.

By effectively addressing cybersecurity risks and aligning BCDR strategies, organizations can mitigate the impact of cyber incidents and maintain the integrity and availability of their information assets.

Business Continuity Frameworks

Business continuity frameworks provide organizations with structured approaches to ensure the ongoing viability of their operations during disruptions. These frameworks come in various types, each catering to different aspects of business continuity. Here are three common types of Business Continuity Frameworks:

Comprehensive Framework

A comprehensive framework offers a holistic approach to business continuity. It covers all aspects of an organization's operations, from IT systems and data recovery to personnel management and crisis communication. This type of framework is well-suited for organizations that have complex operations and need to ensure continuity across various departments and functions. It involves detailed risk assessments, business impact analyses, and detailed plans for both business functions and technology recovery.

Technology-Centric Framework

In technology-centric frameworks, the focus is primarily on IT systems and data recovery . This type of framework is essential for organizations that heavily rely on digital operations and data management. It involves designing robust DRPs and HA strategies to ensure that IT systems can be quickly restored or switched to backup systems in case of failures. This framework is particularly valuable for industries like finance, healthcare, and e-commerce, where uninterrupted access to systems is critical.

Industry-Specific Framework

Certain industries face unique risks and regulatory requirements. Industry-specific frameworks tailor business continuity plans to address these particular challenges. For example, healthcare organizations might need to ensure patient data security during disruptions, while financial institutions must maintain transactional integrity. These frameworks take into account sector-specific regulations and best practices to create tailored business continuity strategies.

Ultimately, the choice of a Business Continuity Framework depends on an organization's size, complexity, industry, and risk tolerance. Some organizations might opt for a combination of frameworks to ensure a well-rounded approach to their business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan. Regardless of the chosen framework, the goal remains consistent: to minimize the impact of disruptions and maintain essential operations to protect the organization's reputation, customer trust, and long-term success.

Who is responsible for business continuity plans?

The short answer to this is, “Everyone.” Responsibility for a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is typically assigned to a team or individuals within an organization who are equipped to oversee its development, implementation, and maintenance. While the specifics can vary based on the organization's size, structure, and industry, there are key roles responsible for different aspects of the BCP:

Executive Leadership. The top management, including the CEO or COO, holds overall responsibility for approving the BCP and allocating resources for its implementation. They provide strategic direction and ensure that business continuity aligns with the organization's objectives.

Business Continuity Manager/Coordinator. This individual or team is directly responsible for overseeing the development, execution, and testing of the BCP. They collaborate with various departments to ensure the plan's effectiveness and manage its ongoing maintenance and updates.

Risk Management Team. The risk management team assesses potential threats, vulnerabilities, and their impact on business operations. They play a crucial role in identifying risks that the BCP needs to address and ensuring that mitigation strategies are in place.

IT Team. IT professionals are responsible for the technical aspects of business continuity, including Disaster Recovery Plans (DRPs) and High Availability (HA) strategies. They ensure that critical systems and data are protected and can be restored swiftly in case of disruptions.

Department Heads. Leaders of various departments contribute by providing insights into the critical functions and resources under their purview. They help in identifying dependencies, critical data, and necessary recovery time objectives.

Employees. While not directly responsible for creating the BCP, all employees play a role in its success. They need to be aware of their roles during disruptions, follow protocols outlined in the plan, and actively participate in training and testing exercises.

Collaboration among these stakeholders is essential to develop a comprehensive and effective BCP. The plan's success hinges on clear communication, shared understanding of roles, and a commitment to maintaining the organization's resilience in the face of unexpected events.

Parallels Quickstart Service

Sc//platform family brochure.

• Desktop Pop-up Alert
• Desktop Scrolling Ticker
• One-click Alert
• Login Screen Alert
• Corporate Screensaver
• Corporate Wallpaper
• Corporate Lockscreen
• SMS Notification
• Emergency Alert
• Digital Signage
• Email Notification
• Extended Reports
• RSVP Invitation
• Video Alert
• Skin Editor
• Mobile Client App
• Technical Support
• Professional Services
• Annual Maintenance
• Engineering
• Hospitality
• Manufacturing
• Oil and Gas
• Change Management
• Email Overload
• Employee Engagement
• Emergency Communications
• Remote Communications
• Compliance Communications
• Internal Communication System
• Crisis Communications
• HR Communications
• Product Overview
• System Requirements
• Documentation
• Templates Library
• Knowledge Base
• AD Integration
• SSO Integration
• API Integration
• Automated Incident Notifications
• MS Teams Integration
• Case Studies
• Become a Partner
• Our Partners

Disaster Recovery vs Business Continuity

Caroline Duncan : Mar 11, 2024 12:30:00 PM

When your company faces a crisis, it is important that you are prepared for both business continuity and disaster recovery so that you can resume your operations as quickly as possible. Understanding business continuity vs disaster recovery is essential – you shouldn’t get the two confused. Having both a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan will help with your organization’s recovery and ongoing viability.

Table of contents

What is business continuity?

5 differences between disaster recovery vs business continuity

Business continuity plan vs disaster recovery plan: do you need both?

What to include in a business continuity plan

What to include in a disaster recovery plan, the risks of not having business continuity and disaster recovery plans, why communication is critical in disaster situations, disaster recovery vs business continuity.

The term business continuity is used to describe a business's process to remain operational during and after a disaster. This includes contingency planning for how a company will operate, who will carry out particular roles, where the business will operate from, and what effects this will have on normal business operations.

hbspt.cta._relativeUrls=true;hbspt.cta.load(2607633, '5069c8e2-ab41-4c12-be05-2c66b3d0562d', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"});

Disaster recovery is a term that describes the plans a company puts into place that it will use to respond to a disaster or other critical event. This can include natural disasters, fire, data loss, cyber-attacks, terrorism, accidents, active shooters and other incidents that have the ability to hamper the business’ operations. Disaster recovery plans help to guide the organization in its response to the incident or event and provide guidance on returning to usual operations safely.

Together, these form an approach called BCDR. BCDR’s meaning is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. BCDR is a comprehensive approach to organizational resilience, encompassing strategies and procedures aimed at ensuring the continuity of critical business functions during and after disruptive events. 

BCDR strategies help organizations effectively respond to emergencies, protect assets, safeguard data, and ultimately ensure business continuity in the face of adversity, thereby enhancing overall resilience and minimizing the impact of disruptions on operations and stakeholders.

Download 9 IT outage messages

5 differences between disaster recovery and business continuity

What is the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery? There are some similarities between the two planning processes: they empower a business with proactive strategies to help it prepare for a catastrophic event. However, there are several differences that organizations should be aware of when it comes to business continuity vs disaster recovery:

• Essentially, business continuity is a focus on keeping the business operational while a disaster unfolds and in its immediate aftermath. On the other hand, disaster recovery32 is a focus on restoring processes, systems and IT infrastructure and data following a critical event.
• Disaster recovery plans often involve scenario planning and conducting preparedness drills and other exercises long before there is an actual incident.
• The delivery of a business continuity plan is at a different time from a disaster recovery plan.
• They have different goals: business continuity plans are concerned with limiting downtime, while disaster recovery plans are concerned with ensuring the company doesn’t suffer from inefficient systems functions.
• Business continuity is concerned with functioning in some capacity, albeit possibly reduced. Disaster recovery is concerned with getting back to normal business functions.

Real-life example of business continuity: Back in 2013, lightning struck the office building of a South Carolina based IT company that hosted servers for 200 clients. The company’s infrastructure was badly affected: cables were melted, computer hardware was burnt, equipment was destroyed and the office couldn’t be used at all.   The company had already implemented business continuity plans five years earlier that included relocating its client servers to a remote data server where continual backups were kept. Clients didn’t experience any issues, and employees had to relocate to temporary office premises for a period of time.

Business continuity vs disaster recovery plans: do you need both?

In order to ensure business continuity or disaster recovery, it is essential to have formal plans in place.

While it is possible to have just one or the other, businesses really should have both disaster recovery plans (DRP) and business continuity plans (BCP) in place to successfully navigate and recover from a disaster. While they are different, they do have some overlap and work well together to help minimize disruption and losses.

When developing a business continuity plan for your organization, you need to consider the following:

• Create a list of all the critical business functions in your organization
• Create a business impact analysis
• Develop a range of different crises scenarios and consider how they could interrupt your business operations
• Develop strategies to mitigate any vulnerabilities you have identified to maintain functionality in a disaster.
• Identify employees who will have key roles in implementing business continuity processes.
• Provide training to relevant employees
• Review and evaluate your business continuity plan regularly.

The disaster recovery plan has some similar requirements and features to the business continuity plan. When developing one, you need to consider the following:

• Identify people in your organization who should form a disaster recovery team.
• Identify the critical processes and functions that could be affected by a disaster.
• Identify potential disaster risks and consider how they could affect your business operations.
• Design disaster recovery strategies and processes.
• Devise back-up plans and procedures.
• Ensure your employees are trained.
• Test and maintain your plan on a regular basis.

Failing to be prepared for a critical situation or a disaster can have significant consequences for a business if it is caught out without appropriate business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

This can include:

• The inability for the business to function following a crisis
• Reduction in productivity following a crisis
• Financial losses
• Reputational damage
• Potential legal consequences, particularly if failure to plan and protect data results in regulatory violations
• Death or injury to employees, customers, the public etc.
• Complete data loss.

10 free emergency messages

When your organization faces a crisis, it is important that your keep employees informed from the outset.

You must send regular, relevant, concise and factual information to employees, letting them know what is happening and providing them with any instructions to follow if necessary. As the situation changes, you should keep updating your staff.

Failure to inform your employees can cause false information and rumors to take hold. This can lead to mistrust, mistakes and can even worsen the situation.

If you need to reach all your employees quickly, using IT alerting software or an emergency alert system is one of the most successful methods of doing so.

DeskAlerts combines both functions. It will enable you to send messages quickly to thousands of employees at once in a way that can’t be ignored. You can reach employees no matter where they are working: in the office, on the road, in a non-desk role or at home, all over the world. The system uses a variety of communications channels, including pop-up alerts , desktop tickers , digital signage and push notifications on mobile phones to ensure your messages get through.

We’ve prepared some examples to help you get started using DeskAlerts pop-up alerts:

Example of a business continuity message that can be tailored to suit your company:.

Important information for all staff.   There has been a [type of incident] that is affecting our operations at [location]. As a result the following services/activities are unavailable and/or have been significantly affected [list these here].   We are enacting our business continuity plan so that we can continue to operate, although in a reduced capacity. Our website, social media channels and call centers have been updated to keep our customers and the community informed about the situation. We expect that the situation will last for [time frame] and are doing everything possible to get back up and running as normal. We will keep you updated as the situation unfolds.   Staff who have been affected should [list what is required of them during this time]   Your patience and cooperation at this difficult time is appreciated.   [CEO name]

Example of a disaster recovery message that can be tailored to suit your company:

Important information for all staff.   As a result of [describe incident] our systems have been severely impacted. This is affecting [company name’s] ability to carry out business. We have now enacted our disaster recovery plan and we have a dedicated team working on resolving the issue and restoring our systems and data.   This issue is expected to take up to [estimated time frame] to be resolved. In the meantime, staff can [list what tasks or work you may have employees do in the interim]. Further information will be communicated as the situation unfolds.   Staff are reminded to maintain confidentiality about this situation and not to post on social media or talk to the press. Customers with questions can be referred to our call center who will have the most up to date information and will prevent misinformation or old information from being circulated.   Your patience and cooperation at this challenging time is appreciated.   [CEO name}

Any business can find itself mired in a disaster when it least expects it. Having robust contingency plans in place will help to ensure that the business comes out the other side still able to operate.

What are disaster recovery and business continuity plans?

There are differences between a disaster recovery plan vs business continuity plan. A disaster recovery plan is designed to save and recover data and other business processes in the event of a critical incident. A business continuity plan is designed to keep a business functioning in some capacity when it finds itself involved in a critical incident.

How is business continuity planning different from disaster recovery planning?

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are different. Business continuity plans are concerned with establishing how business operations will function in the event of abnormal circumstances as a result of an emergency or disaster. A disaster recovery plan is concerned with how applications and systems will be reinstated and returned to normal operation.

What is the difference between BCM and DR?

BCM – business continuity management – is an organization’s ability to keep delivering its products and services during a disaster. DR – disaster recovery – is generally about technology and refers to how an organization recovers from an incident.

What is BCP in disaster recovery?

In the disaster recovery process, a BCP is a business continuity plan that describes the way a company may mitigate loss of business and define the requirements to continue operations in a disaster situation.

What comes first, disaster recovery or business continuity?

Business continuity planning and disaster recovery involves following a process. A company should have business continuity planning as the foundation of its disaster planning – therefore it needs to happen before disaster recovery planning.

Is business continuity a new name for disaster recovery?

Business continuity is different from disaster recovery. It is focussed on keeping a business functioning in some capacity after a critical incident.

What is the difference between DRP and BCP in cyber security?

There are some differences in disaster recovery versus business continuity. Business continuity planning involves strategic long-term plans for a business’s uninterrupted operations in the event of a threat or disruption. Disaster recovery planning is a short-term tactical plan used to deal with specific computing and other IT-related outages .

Learn more about cybersecurity in the workplace .

What are the differences between disaster recovery and business continuity?

Disaster recovery focuses on restoring the technical and communications equipment and processes after an emergency event. It deals with getting a business’ all-important IT infrastructure and operations up and running again. 

On the other hand, business continuity outlines how a business will proceed both during and following a disaster. It includes contingency plans for continuing operations, even if the business has to move to an alternate location or work with reduced systems infrastructure.

How are business continuity and disaster recovery similar?

Business continuity and disaster recovery are both important components of organizational resilience. They share similarities in their aims of maintaining operations during disruptive events. Both involve planning and preparation to ensure the continuation of critical functions. While disaster recovery primarily focuses on IT systems and data restoration after a crisis or emergency event, business continuity encompasses broader strategies to sustain overall business operations during various types of disruptions.

Which comes first business continuity or disaster recovery?

Business continuity takes precedence over disaster recovery. When a critical event occurs, the continuity plan is immediately activated to ensure the organization can function.

 The disaster recovery plan follows, specifically safeguarding IT systems and critical data after the emergency has passed.

How business continuity and disaster recovery are connected?

Understanding what is business continuity and disaster recovery will help you realize they are closely intertwined. Here’s how they connect:

• Preparation : Business continuity plans (BCPs) outline strategies to keep essential operations running during and after a disaster. Disaster recovery plans (DRPs) focus on restoring IT systems and data after an incident.
• Complementary roles: BCPs ensure overall business resilience, while DRPs specifically address technical recovery. Together, they minimize disruptions and help organizations bounce back effectively .

 Send urgent notifications to any corporate devices: PCs, phones, tablets, etc.

The high visibility combined with our 100% delivery rate guarantee. Bypass information overload. Deliver key information even if the computer is on screensaver mode, locked or sleeping.

Posts by Tag

• Alert Software (43)
• Best Practices (13)
• Business Continuity (8)
• Change Management (23)
• Communication in finance (6)
• Communications Feedback Solutions (27)
• Construction Industry (5)
• Corporate Communication Strategy (29)
• Corporate Communication Tools (29)
• Corporate compliance (7)
• Corporate lockscreen (3)
• Corporate screensaver (4)
• Corporate wallpaper (5)
• COVID-19 (31)
• Crisis Communications (7)
• Cybersecurity (25)
• Desktop Alerts (16)
• Desktop Alerts Software (28)
• Digital signage (6)
• duty of care (4)
• Education (11)
• Email overload (17)
• Emergency Alert System (71)
• Emergency communications (21)
• Employee Communication (25)
• Employee Communication Channels (15)
• Employee Engagement (43)
• Employee quiz (2)
• Employee survey (4)
• Executive communications (6)
• Government Industry (6)
• Health and Safety Training (3)
• Healthcare (25)
• Helpdesk (26)
• Hospitality (1)
• HR Communications (58)
• Improve Corporate Communication (430)
• Internal Communication Best Practices (121)
• Internal Communication Channels (29)
• Internal Communication Plan (12)
• Internal Communication Strategy (27)
• Internal Communication Tools (51)
• Internal Communications (49)
• Internal marketing communications (4)
• Internet Security (41)
• IT communications (17)
• IT Issues (24)
• IT Outage (23)
• Manufacturing (5)
• Mass notification (28)
• Mobile App (2)
• MS Teams (2)
• New Release (1)
• Organizational culture (10)
• Pharmaceutical industry (1)
• Pop-up alerts (7)
• RSVP alert (3)
• Safety Culture (5)
• Security Awareness Training (18)
• SMS Notifications (1)
• Staff training (5)
• Strategy-Internal Communication Tools (2)
• Telecom (1)
• Video Alert (3)
• Workplace Safety (1)

12 min read

Motivational Messages for Employees From Managers

IT Onboarding Checklist For New Hires and How To Compile It Correctly?

Developing a consistent process to onboard new employees into your organization ensures that from the very start they feel as though they are part of...

What is Alyssa’s Law and How Can DeskAlerts Instruments Help Schools?

Many states across the USA have now implemented “Alyssa’s Law” to help improve emergency response times in public elementary and secondary schools....

• Organizations
• Planning & Activities
• Product & Services
• Structure & Systems
• Career & Education
• Entertainment
• Fashion & Beauty
• Political Institutions
• SmartPhones
• Protocols & Formats
• Communication
• Web Applications
• Household Equipments
• Career and Certifications
• Diet & Fitness
• Mathematics & Statistics
• Processed Foods
• Vegetables & Fruits

Difference Between Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan

• Categorized under Business , Management | Difference Between Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan

The world we live is not so perfect. We live in a world of uncertainties where we often see news about tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other forces of nature creating havoc in their aftermath, destroying homes, devastating cities, and shutting down businesses. These natural disasters not only impact the normal lives of the normal people but also have devastating effects on businesses and organizations around the world. So, as a result, the need to plan for potential disruptions to business operations and technology services has increased exponentially. Businesses have contingencies in place that help prepare them for such events. Business continuity and disaster recovery are comprehensive plans of action that are put into effect when a disaster strikes. These are not prevention of the disaster itself, but prevention of what the organization is otherwise unprepared for.

What is Business Continuity Plan?

Business Continuity Plan (BCP), as the name suggests, is a long-term planning that involves creating and validating a plan that outlines how a business continue to operate during an unplanned disruption of services and operations. BCP is a proactive plan of creating a system of prevention and recovery in the face of a disaster, whether a flood, power failure, fire, or cyberattack. It is a plan of action to ensure continuity of business operations before, during and after disasters and disruptive events. BCP is concerned with the activities and processes required to ensure the continuation of critical business operations in an organization to avoid a total loss to the business. It concerns with managing the operational elements within an organization that allow the business to function normally in order to generate revenues. Standards are employed, protocols are established, and recovery systems are created that can lead to immediate mitigating steps.

What is Disaster Recovery Plan?

Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is the immediate plan of action that is followed by business continuity operations, and is concerned with the immediate impact of an unplanned event. DRP involves a set of protocols, procedures and policies set by an organization to deal with unplanned incidents such as power outages, natural calamities, and cyberattacks. It is a well-structured, documented approach to deal with specific IT-oriented disruptions such as server outage, power outage, cyberattack, system breach, and so on. Disaster recovery, as the name suggests, involves mitigating the effects of the disaster as quickly as possible and addressing the immediate aftermath. Whereas BCP provides a long-term, strategic approach to ensure continuity of operations, DRP is considered tactical which calls for immediate response to mitigating the impact of a disaster and recovery of critical IT systems. It is a part of business continuity planning and applied to certain aspects of an organization that ensure normal functioning of the IT operations.

Difference between Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan

Approach .

– Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a plan of action to ensure continuity of business operations before, during and after disasters and disruptive events. It provides a long-term, strategic approach to creating and validating a plan to ensure the continuation of critical business operations in an organization. Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a plan of action that is immediately followed by business continuity operations to mitigate the impact of a disaster and recovery of critical IT systems. Unlike BCP, it takes a more tactical approach to deal with unplanned incidents.

Focus 

– While disaster recovery is considered a subset of business continuity planning, the focus of the BCP and DRP are distinct, with the former attending to the business as a whole while the latter is more focused on information systems. There comes a time, when the two processes overlap. BCP focuses on the operational elements within an organization that allow the business to function normally whereas DRP focuses on certain aspects of an organization that ensure normal functioning of the IT operations. While these two plans have different scopes, they are fundamentally intertwined.

 – Business continuity planning involves a series of procedures and steps to restore normal business operations within an organization when a disaster strikes, with maximum speed and minimal impact on operations. The steps involve risk assessment and management, establishing a planning committee, prioritizing recovery needs, obtaining top management commitment, developing and implementing a plan, testing the plan, test evaluation and the business continuity phase.

The primary purposes of DRP are prevention, continuity and recovery. The steps in DRP involve creating a disaster recovery plan, identifying and assessing disaster risks, identifying mitigating actions, determining Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD), criticality analysis, developing key recovery targets, telecommunication management and utility management, identifying recovery strategies, and finally getting the systems up and running.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan: Comparison Chart

While both business continuity and disaster recovery planning are intertwined, their focus are distinct, with the former attending to the business as a whole while the latter is more focused on information systems. The business continuity plan involves multiple specific plans, including the disaster recovery plan. The scopes of both the plans are different, yet the disaster recovery plan is considered a subset of business continuity plan and BCP would be doomed to fail if it is not followed by a tactical plan of action for immediately dealing with disruption of information systems.

• Recent Posts
• Difference Between PMP and PMI - April 30, 2024
• Difference Between LCD and LED Televisions - April 27, 2024
• Difference Between JPEG and RAW - April 25, 2024

Sharing is caring!

• Pinterest 3

Search DifferenceBetween.net :

• Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
• Difference Between BCP and DR
• Difference Between Business Continuity and Contingency Plan
• Difference Between Business Continuity and Business Resilience
• Difference Between Business Management and Administration

Cite APA 7 Khillar, S. (2021, November 11). Difference Between Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan. Difference Between Similar Terms and Objects. http://www.differencebetween.net/business/difference-between-business-continuity-plan-and-disaster-recovery-plan/. MLA 8 Khillar, Sagar. "Difference Between Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan." Difference Between Similar Terms and Objects, 11 November, 2021, http://www.differencebetween.net/business/difference-between-business-continuity-plan-and-disaster-recovery-plan/.

Leave a Response

Name ( required )

Email ( required )

Please note: comment moderation is enabled and may delay your comment. There is no need to resubmit your comment.

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail

References :

Advertisments, more in 'business'.

• Difference Between Tactics And Strategy
• Difference Between PMP and PMI
• Difference Between LLC and INC
• Difference Between DJIA and NASDAQ
• Difference Between BPO and Call Center

More in 'Management'

• Difference Between HRM and Personnel Management
• Difference Between Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard
• Difference Between Furlough and Redundancy

Top Difference Betweens

Get new comparisons in your inbox:, most emailed comparisons, editor's picks.

• Difference Between MAC and IP Address
• Difference Between Platinum and White Gold
• Difference Between Civil and Criminal Law
• Difference Between GRE and GMAT
• Difference Between Immigrants and Refugees
• Difference Between DNS and DHCP
• Difference Between Computer Engineering and Computer Science
• Difference Between Men and Women
• Difference Between Book value and Market value
• Difference Between Red and White wine
• Difference Between Depreciation and Amortization
• Difference Between Bank and Credit Union
• Difference Between White Eggs and Brown Eggs

• +1 (800) 826-0777
• VIRTUAL TOUR
• Mass Notification
• Threat Intelligence
• Employee Safety Monitoring
• Travel Risk Management
• Emergency Preparedness
• Remote Workforce
• Location and Asset Protection
• Business Continuity
• Why AlertMedia
• Who We Serve
• Customer Spotlights
• Resource Library
• Downloads & Guides

A Deming Cycle Approach to Business Continuity Strategy

Building your business continuity strategy on a Design-Test-Reflect-Iterate cycle lays a solid, adaptable foundation to manage dynamic risks.

How to Build Your Business Continuity Strategy

It’s not a question of if but when a business will encounter disruption. Challenges are inevitable, whether natural disasters, cybersecurity breaches, or other unforeseen emergencies. How your company responds will determine its trajectory.

Forty-three percent of small businesses affected by a natural disaster never reopen. But a business continuity strategy can prevent your business from living the statistics. We’ve talked to financial, aerospace, and telecom industry leaders to understand their business continuity strategies. Read on to learn about crafting an adaptable, systemic approach to navigating expected and unforeseen challenges.

Download Our Business Continuity Checklist

A cyclical approach to business continuity.

Business is not static, and neither are the threats to operations. Organizations need dynamic frameworks to navigate uncertainty in an environment characterized by constant change and evolving risks. That’s why many companies turn to the Deming Cycle, also known as PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act).

• Plan: Develop a robust continuity strategy
• Do: Execute the preparedness measures
• Check: Assess effectiveness through testing
• Act: Adjust based on feedback for continual improvement

A business continuity strategy ensures your organization can maintain operational resilience during and after a crisis. With a systematic approach, you can manage various disruptions effectively. But first, you need to understand the potential threats to your business and how those threats would disrupt operational continuity.

This assessment process is critical for your initial planning and as an ongoing pulse check to ensure your business continuity strategy is effective—considering how your organization’s vulnerabilities and risks are changing.

• Design: Develop the initial framework
• Test: Implement controls to assess functionality and performance
• Reflect: Evaluate outcomes and identify critical optimizations
• Iterate: Adapt the strategy for improved business continuity management

Better business continuity planning with SAC Wireless

On The Employee Safety Podcast , we spoke with Larry Pomykalski, Director of National Programs & Business Continuity at SAC Wireless. Larry underscores the need to cast a wide net when planning for interruptions. The plan should be broad enough to encompass a broad range of scenarios while maintaining business processes. By continuously evaluating and adjusting plans based on feedback and changing circumstances, it’s possible to minimize business disruption and speed recovery.

Larry notes that while it’s impossible to foresee every disruption, having a variety of plans enables organizations to modify strategies quickly to suit the current situation. By identifying critical business functions and establishing recovery time objectives, businesses can prioritize risks as they develop effective mitigation strategies tailored to their specific needs.

“Remain open-minded; be imaginative about what you can and can’t see impacting your organization.[…] That’s the first step in tracking potential threats,” Larry advises.

1. Design a working business continuity management strategy

Identify stakeholders and plan leaders.

A business continuity management (BCM) team is responsible for implementing your plan, so choosing the right people is vital to success. It’s typically an interdisciplinary team made up of individuals from various departments and roles within the organization, including:

• Business Continuity Manager: This individual leads the continuity program’s development, implementation, and maintenance.
• Risk Management Specialist: They identify, assess, and prioritize risks to the organization’s operations.
• IT Director/Manager: This leader ensures critical IT systems and infrastructure resilience.
• Operations Manager: Their role involves coordinating continuity efforts across departments and ensuring operational readiness.
• Human Resources Manager: They are responsible for developing employee safety, communication, and workforce continuity plans.
• Facilities Manager: This leader addresses physical security and facility-related risks.
• Supply Chain Manager: They are responsible for assessing supply chain risks and developing strategies for continuity.
• Legal and Compliance Officer: Their responsibilities include continuity plan compliance with regulatory requirements and contractual obligations.
• Communications Coordinator: Their main task is to develop communication protocols and channels for internal and external stakeholders during emergencies.
• Team Leaders: These individuals act as boots on the ground, providing direction and guidance to workers on the floor, in the field, or wherever they’re located.

By assembling a diverse and capable team with representation from these key areas, organizations can effectively address all aspects of business continuity planning and enhance their resilience to disruptions.

Assess potential risks and impacts

Only by knowing your risk profile inside and out can you manage and mitigate the risks to business continuity. The more you know, the more proactive you can be.

Assessments come in different forms. A threat or risk assessment considers the potential causes of disruptions, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, power outages, supply chain interruptions, public demonstrations, public health risks, and many more. On the other hand, a business impact analysis focuses on the impacts that arise from these emergencies and disruptions, such as downtime, travel delays, compromised data, increased costs, facilities damage, delayed or lost income, regulatory fines, reputational damage, and more.

Begin with both types of assessment to understand the vulnerabilities and risks that could threaten business continuity.

Navigate resiliency challenges with regular assessments

Regular vulnerability assessments are crucial to maintaining business continuity, especially in the face of evolving challenges, such as a geographically dispersed workforce and climate-related disruptions. Jeff Dow, Manager of Protection and Resiliency at a major financial organization, highlighted the importance of staying vigilant during a recent interview on The Employee Safety Podcast .

Jeff’s team recognized that transitioning to a hybrid work model, with employees across 49 states, introduced new risks and vulnerabilities. They conducted thorough risk assessments to identify potential threats related to remote work, like extreme weather events.

They concentrated on three assessment methods to adapt their plans supporting business continuity:

Set your recovery time objective (RTO)

When setting a recovery time objective (RTO), you must consider your organization’s specific needs and priorities. Start by evaluating the criticality of each business process or system, considering factors such as customer expectations, regulatory requirements, and financial implications. Determine the maximum tolerable downtime for each function, keeping in mind that mission-critical systems may require a shorter RTO than less essential processes.

Once you’ve defined the RTOs for your key business functions, develop comprehensive strategies to achieve them. This may involve implementing redundant systems, establishing backup procedures, and investing in technologies that minimize downtime. Review and update your RTOs to ensure they remain relevant and aligned with your evolving business needs.

Remember to conduct tests and simulations regularly to validate the achievability of your RTOs and identify areas for improvement in your recovery strategies. Setting realistic and achievable recovery time objectives can enhance your organization’s preparedness for disruptions and minimize their impact on your operations and stakeholders.

Develop plans to prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from business disruptions

You might as well consider every version of your business continuity plan (BCP) a rough draft. Until it has been tested, you can’t be sure it’s comprehensive or effective enough to safeguard your business operations. Here are some necessary elements to consider for your dynamic strategy:

• The tools and the team to monitor threats and determine their potential impacts on your organization
• An emergency communication plan and a software system to keep everyone connected during expected and unexpected crises
• Backup plans, equipment, locations, power, and any other redundancies that will keep operations running

Read more about the business continuity planning process on our blog.

2. Test your plan during actual and simulated emergencies

Train employees.

In the previous step, you determined which stakeholders need to be involved in the planning and preparedness efforts, risk mitigation, response procedures, disaster recovery, and any other elements of your business continuity strategy. This next phase involves preparing these people for their responsibilities. Here are suggested trainings tailored to each stakeholder’s role within the business continuity framework:

• Business Continuity Manager: Training should cover developing and maintaining the continuity program, including risk assessment methodologies, plan development, testing protocols, and coordination with departmental stakeholders.
• Risk Management Specialist: Offer detailed training on risk assessment techniques such as scenario analysis, impact assessment, and probability assessment.
• IT Director/Manager: Conduct technical training on data backup and recovery procedures, system redundancy configurations, cybersecurity best practices, and incident response protocols.
• Operations Manager: Provide training on crisis management principles, including incident response procedures, business impact analysis, and resource allocation strategies.
• Human Resources Manager: Offer comprehensive training on crisis communication strategies, employee safety protocols, and workforce continuity planning. Include modules on remote work arrangements, employee assistance programs, and psychological support during crises.
• Facilities Manager: Review building security systems, access control protocols, emergency response drills, and facility maintenance procedures.
• Supply Chain Manager: Provide training on supply chain risk management techniques, including supplier assessment methodologies, inventory management strategies, and alternative sourcing options.
• Legal and Compliance Officer: Cover topics such as data protection laws, industry standards, contractual obligations for continuity services, and legal implications of business disruptions.
• Communications Coordinator: Provide comprehensive training on crisis communication strategies, including message development, media relations, stakeholder engagement techniques, and communication channel management.

By providing detailed and targeted training to each stakeholder, you ensure they have the necessary knowledge and skills to contribute to the organization’s business continuity efforts effectively. Of course, a significant part of that training is testing the skills they’ve learned.

Conduct drills and other exercises

Emergency drills , full-scale simulations, and tabletop exercises can test your preparedness, response, and recovery plans. These exercises allow you to identify weaknesses and gaps in your plans in a controlled environment, enabling you to address them proactively before a real crisis occurs. By simulating various scenarios, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your communication protocols, decision-making processes, and resource allocation strategies.

Involving key stakeholders in these exercises fosters collaboration, enhances coordination, and increases familiarity with their roles and responsibilities during emergencies. Regularly conducting drills and exercises ensures your team remains well-prepared and agile in responding to unexpected events, strengthening your organization’s resilience and ability to navigate challenges effectively.

After-action reviews following exercises, not just actual emergencies, are essential for continuous improvement and learning. These reviews provide an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of your response and recovery plans in a structured manner before putting them to the test with your business on the line. By examining what went well and what could be improved, you can identify lessons learned and best practices to incorporate into future planning efforts.

On top of that, conducting after-action reviews fosters a culture of accountability and transparency within your organization, encouraging open communication and constructive feedback among team members. This process allows you to iterate on your strategies and capabilities, ensuring you are better prepared to handle real emergencies when they arise.

Activate the plan as any actual threats or disruptions arise

Hopefully, you’ve been able to prioritize training and exercises before a significant crisis hits. Doing so ensures that your team is well-prepared to execute the plan with confidence and efficiency when it matters most.

However, even if you haven’t had the opportunity to conduct extensive training beforehand, your preparation through drills and simulations will still significantly enhance your response capabilities. Remember to remain agile and adaptable during emergencies, leveraging the knowledge and experience gained from training to make informed decisions and effectively manage the situation.

3. Reflect on the plan’s effectiveness and its need to evolve

Perform after-action reviews.

After-action reviews (AARs) enhance business resilience by providing a structured post-crisis evaluation and improvement framework. These reviews thoroughly examine the response to a crisis or disruption, aiming to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for enhancement. They allow you to test your business continuity plan and management systems in real-time to address any gaps. Typically conducted shortly after the event, AARs gather input from key stakeholders involved in the response effort, including frontline responders, managers, and support staff.

Conducting an AAR begins with a comprehensive review of the incident, including the timeline of events, actions taken, and outcomes achieved. This retrospective analysis allows participants to understand what transpired during the crisis and how the organization responded. Facilitators guide discussions by prompting participants to reflect on their experiences, share observations, and identify successes and improvement areas.

Central to the AAR process is emphasizing open and honest communication, creating a safe space for participants to voice their perspectives and insights without fear of retribution. This collaborative approach fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement within the organization. By soliciting feedback from all levels of the organization, AARs capture diverse perspectives, enriching the insights gained from the review process.

Determine gaps and necessary contingency plans

The ultimate goal of conducting AARs is to distill lessons learned from the crisis response and translate them into actionable improvements to the organization’s business continuity plan and risk management strategy. This may involve updating procedures, refining communication protocols, or investing additional resources to address identified gaps. By leveraging the insights gleaned from AARs, organizations can strengthen their preparedness for future crises, enhancing their resilience and ability to navigate adversity effectively.

Boeing’s all-hazards approach to business continuity

An effective business continuity plan relies heavily on the team’s ability to collaborate seamlessly, even across physical and geographic boundaries. On The Employee Safety Podcast , we spoke with Keith Berthiume, Enterprise Emergency Preparedness Program Manager at Boeing, to understand why Boeing is an excellent example of an agile, collaborative approach.

Keith underscores the significance of assembling diverse teams to evaluate impacts, recognize critical needs and functions, and coordinate responses promptly. This real-time collaboration has proven instrumental for Boeing, enabling the company to swiftly adapt and respond to evolving situations, such as the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Boeing’s success highlights the importance of effective communication and coordination within the organization and with external stakeholders, including service providers and off-site teams. Businesses can enhance their resilience and readiness to navigate complex, unforeseen disruptions by fostering collaboration across boundaries.

“Having senior leaders all together on a team is a significant force multiplier because the executives at the highest level of the company are able to ensure implementation of integrated and coordinated response, seamless coordination, and a unified direction from the leadership team,” Keith told us.

4. Iterate on your strategy in light of dynamic risks

Adapt to company changes.

The after-action reviews are what keep the cycle turning. While the advance threat and impact assessments help you align with and prioritize what you know, post-event reviews are about opening up to what you don’t know—or what you didn’t know with the most recent iteration of your plan.

You may only know about certain vulnerabilities once you are in an actual or simulated emergency. So, looking back and acting on those learnings is foundational to business continuity.

Adapt to changing risk

Twenty years ago, businesses rarely considered the effect that a prolonged pandemic could have on their ability to operate. Continuity plans were based more on immediate threats like natural disasters or economic downturns.

However, the landscape has shifted dramatically, emphasizing the need for organizations to adapt and expand their risk management strategies to encompass emerging threats such as pandemics. The global impact of COVID-19 has underscored the importance of proactive planning and preparedness for unforeseen events that can disrupt operations on a massive scale. As businesses navigate the complexities of this evolving risk landscape, it becomes increasingly crucial to prioritize resilience and agility in their continuity planning efforts.

In response to the lessons learned from COVID-19 and other emerging risks, business leaders can take proactive steps to stay ahead of future challenges. To adapt to changing risks, you should:

• Conduct regular risk assessments to identify vulnerabilities.
• Diversify supply chains to mitigate disruptions.
• Prioritize employee well-being and flexible work arrangements.
• Implement cross-training programs to ensure redundancy in critical roles.
• Maintain adequate financial reserves to weather economic uncertainties.
• Strengthen cybersecurity measures for remote work environments by implementing multi-factor authentication, encryption, and regular security training.

Organizations can also make use of various technologies for proactive threat monitoring. Threat intelligence platforms can help them discover cyber risks, while real-time alert tools can keep them ahead of natural disasters or other widespread disruptions.

Strategic Planning to Keep the Wheel Turning

Business continuity planning is not a nice-to-have but a necessity in today’s unpredictable world. Whether it’s a natural disaster, cybersecurity breach, or other unforeseen emergency, the ability to respond effectively can make or break a business. As industry leaders and best practices highlight, adopting a structured approach like the PDCA cycle is essential for building resilience and adaptability.

Learning from business continuity strategy examples, companies can prioritize collaboration, real-time communication, and flexibility in their response efforts. Download our business continuity checklist for a template to help guide you on solid business continuity planning.

More Articles You May Be Interested In

Business Continuity Checklist

Please complete the form below to receive this resource.

Check Your Inbox!

The document you requested has been sent to your provided email address.

Cookies are required to play this video.

Click the blue shield icon on the bottom left of your screen to edit your cookie preferences.

• Desktop Recovery
• Laptop Recovery
• External Hard Drive Recovery
• NAS Recovery
• Server Recovery
• RAID Recovery
• Tape Recovery
• Mobile/Tablet Recovery
• All Devices
• By Solution
• Photo Recovery
• Database Recovery
• File Recovery
• Ransomware Recovery
• Virtualized System Recovery
• Microsoft Windows Recovery
• CCTV/DVR Recovery
• Remote Recovery
• All Solutions
• By Industry
• Small Business
• Individuals
• IT & Cyber Security
• Consultants
• All Industries

They have excellent customer service.

Carol Pratt | October 05

• Data Recovery
• Flash/Memory Card Recovery
• Tape Services
• Tape Auditing
• Tape Cataloging
• Tape Migration
• Tape Restoration
• Data Destruction
• Erasure Verification Services

Other Services

• Mobile Phone Repair Services
• Email Extraction Services

...worth every penny. Thank you.

Marleke | September 05

• Ontrack EasyRecovery
• EasyRecovery for Windows
• EasyRecovery for Mac
• EasyRecovery for Photo
• EasyRecovery for iPhone
• Ontrack Desk
• Data Erasure Software
• Drive Erase
• Mobile Erase
• Flash Erase
• Management Console
• Hosted Erase
• Data Erasure Hardware
• Ontrack PowerControls
• Ontrack PowerControls Exchange
• Ontrack PowerControls Sharepoint
• Ontrack PowerControls SQL

I highly recommend Ontrack!

Litfin | March 20

• Ontrack Partner Program
• Partner Resources

Technology Partners

• Western Digital

Very efficient company

Charles Wilcox | May 04

A step-by-step guide to disaster recovery planning

Written By: Tim Black

Date Published: Aug 29, 2022 12:00:00 AM

Aug 29, 2022 12:00:00 AM

By: Tim Black

According to data specialists, Nexstor, 90% of businesses with no disaster recovery capabilities close after a major failure, while 60% of small businesses that lose data close within six months. These are scary statistics and show the importance of having a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. In this blog, we go into a bit more detail about disaster recovery planning and the steps you should take to prepare your organisation.

A disaster recovery strategy

Every organisation that wants to protect its data should have a disaster recovery strategy in place. From flooding to cybercrime, like ransomware, when an organisation is hit by a disaster it can be an incredibly daunting task for it to get back up and running again.

Businesses are increasingly reliant on large data centres and high-performing networks due to the amount of data they produce. The protection of the software and hardware that allows them to function is, therefore, a vital asset to protect. When your IT is thinking about a disaster recovery plan, ensure they consider the following disaster recovery steps.

Make sure you know the scope of your project 

Does your organisation need quick and easy access to your data to stay in business? If so, then your disaster recovery plan should ensure that your data is kept safe and secure at all times – even if your onsite hardware experiences a critical failure. A good way of doing this is by using offsite data storage options like a data centre.

Know your organisation’s vulnerabilities

Has your organisation had a history of being hit by cybercrime? Or are you in a geographic region that has a history of flooding? Your disaster recovery plan should aim to protect as many of your assets as possible, but you may have to prioritise to ensure you protect the most important areas of your business.

Conduct a risk analysis

You may now know what your organisation’s vulnerabilities are, but now you need to test your safeguards. Testing your vulnerabilities will give you a valuable perspective of how well positioned you are to protect your most valuable assets.

Identify your recovery strategies

Ensuring you have an effective and cost-efficient recovery strategy is the next step. Having a data recovery specialist on speed dial is a vital part of any disaster recovery plan. The less time you waste the more chance you have of recovering any data that might be lost. A data recovery company can also help you restore any backup you may have.

Put your plan to paper

You are now ready to draw up your plan. You should gather all of your insights and ideas and put them into an easy-to-understand, comprehensive guide. This guide should be stored in a place that is easy for all employees to access. It is also important to ensure you have a hard copy.

Train your employees

It is vital that you train your employees to understand everything that is involved in the disaster recovery plan. You should have been collaborating with key employees throughout this process, but you must make sure every member of your organisation knows what steps to take in the event of a disaster. Doing things in the wrong order could put your whole organisation at risk and might lead to the destruction of the data you are trying to recover. Training your employees will also give you a fresh perspective of your plan, and could highlight some points you may not have thought of.

Test your plan

If you don’t test your plan, how will you know if it actually works? Running through the plan in a staged environment will allow you to see how each step unfolds and whether you need to amend anything.

Revise and update when necessary

Technology is changing and updating all the time. Is it a good idea to revise your plan regularly to ensure it is still up-to-date. There may be new products or services you want to implement into your plan, or you may have had a major operational change. Either way, asking these kinds of questions will make sure you are prepared when a disaster strikes.

Business Continuity Plans and Disaster Recovery Plans

There is often a lot of confusion regarding the difference between business continuity plans (BCPs) and disaster recovery plans (DRPs).

A BCP is a documented plan that lays out the steps to take when an organisation is affected by unexpected scenarios that are often business-critical. A good BCP covers the need for resources, processes, and functions to get back to regular operation, reducing the amount of downtime.

A DRP is a documented process for restoring vital support systems, e.g. hardware, IT assets and communications. A DRP’s aim is to minimise downtime and focuses on getting technical operations back up and running in as short a time as possible.

What’s the difference between them? 

The main difference is when each plan takes effect. A BCP focuses on keeping your organisation operational during the disaster and immediately after. A DRP focuses on how you respond after the event has happened, and most importantly, how your organisation returns to normal. For example, if your organisation’s headquarters are badly flooded, your BCP will suggest that all employees work remotely. However, this solution is only a temporary fix to the disaster. Therefore, the DRP will focus on how to get all employees back into a single office and how to replace all of the equipment that may have been damaged.

Download our IT Disaster Recovery Plan template

The purpose of our template is to help small businesses familiarise themselves with the building blocks of an IT Disaster Recovery Plan (IT DRP) and to start thinking about what it would take to resume normal operations if their data and infrastructure were implicated in a severe IT-incident.

Download now 

Related Topics

Writing a disaster recovery plan for your business [free template], developing a server data recovery business continuity plan, leveraging virtualization for business continuity.

Connect with Ontrack to RECEIVE DATA RECOVERY INSIGHTS AND TIPS, information about industry events, and much more. Subscribe to OUR NEWSLETTER now!

• Email Extraction
• Mobile Phone Repair
• Press Releases
• Case Studies
• Articles & FAQs
• Info Sheets

9023 Columbine Road Eden Prairie, MN 55347, United States ( see all locations )

• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy and Settings
• Legal Notices
• Data Subject Access Request Form
• Transparency Report
• Service/Product Terms

© 2024 KLDiscovery Ontrack, LLC - All Rights Reserved.

•   English
•   Deutsch
•   Italiano
•   Français

How to Create a Network Disaster Recovery Plan

This article explores what a network disaster recovery plan (NDRP) is, why it’s important, and how to create an effective one.

• Cost Optimization
• Disaster Recovery

Apr 30, 2024

A network disaster recovery plan (NDRP) is a documented approach that helps businesses minimize downtime and prevent data loss due to a cyberattack, natural disaster, or other unforeseen event.

When Colonial Pipeline fell victim to a devastating cyberattack in May 2021, the company’s operations came to a standstill, leading to widespread fuel shortages throughout the eastern United States. Even with backups, it was six days before the energy company was able to get its systems up and running again.

Downtime is enormously expensive. Most estimates put the average cost at a few thousand dollars per minute. In some industries, that number is considerably higher, with the brokerage industry topping the list at around $108,000 per minute of downtime . 

That’s why having a robust network disaster recovery plan (NDRP) is more important than ever. Cyberattacks, including ransomware , are on the rise. A viable NDRP is an essential component of any corporate risk mitigation program because it allows for rapid recovery from incidents that could otherwise lead to crippling business disruptions .

Slashing Storage TCO

Cost-optimized, All-flash Storage Is Here. Now.

Unlock massive savings, on-premises and in the cloud.

What Is a Network Disaster Recovery Plan?

A network disaster recovery plan is a documented, structured approach to fully restoring IT operations damaged by a cyberattack, natural disaster, or other unforeseen event. Its primary purpose is to minimize downtime and prevent data loss by restoring network capabilities and services as quickly and effectively as possible.

Basic Elements of a Network Disaster Recovery Plan

Key components of a network disaster recovery plan include:

• Risk assessment: This includes the identification of potential threats such as cyberattacks, hardware failure, natural disasters, or localized events like fires or flooding. The plan should include an assessment of the likelihood and detailed impact of each scenario.
• Recovery objectives: The NDRP should include key measurable outcomes such as recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) which define the maximum tolerable downtime and maximum allowable data loss, respectively.
• Inventory of assets: An effective NDRP should include an inventory of the various network components essential to maintaining business operations, such as hardware, software, data, and connectivity.
• Recovery strategies: The plan should outline the specific procedures necessary for recovering network services and components, addressing each scenario identified in the risk assessment. Typically, this will involve the use of redundant systems, disaster recovery as a service , and resilient data storage architectures designed to support rapid and complete recovery.
• Communication plan: Your NDRP should specify how communications should be handled during a disaster, detailing how employees, customers, regulators, and others will be kept up to date.
• Roles and responsibilities: This section defines the roles that individuals and teams will play throughout the recovery process. It should also specify the responsibilities of various parties for maintaining a state of readiness.
• Testing and training: If you’ve never tested your disaster recovery plans, then you don’t really know whether they’ll work in an emergency. Organizations should train regularly, test specific procedures, and conduct periodic drills to ensure that the plan works as intended.
• Maintenance and update schedule: It’s critical to update the network disaster recovery plan on a regular basis to keep it current with both technological and organizational changes.

Benefits of Implementing an NDRP

A network disaster recovery plan protects your organization against downtime and data loss. The combined impact of missed productivity, lost revenue, customer attrition, and reputational damage can be profound. 

By minimizing downtime and ensuring a faster resumption of services, an NDRP helps mitigate financial losses. Prolonged outages can lead to direct revenue loss, contractual penalties, and lost opportunities, all of which can be avoided or minimized with an effective recovery plan.

For instance, consider what might happen to a consumer goods company that operates an e-commerce storefront, along with manufacturing and distribution centers to serve both end users and retailers. Faced with a crippling cyberattack, the company’s website is down. Frustrated customers voice their disappointment on popular social media sites and may take their business to the competition.

The company can no longer process orders for retailers, either. In fact, a recent batch of orders was lost altogether, leaving the company with no way to know what was ordered by whom. The company’s most important sales channels are left with insufficient inventory, leading to even more lost revenue. 

A well-crafted NDRP helps minimize downtime, enabling rapid recovery from disasters. It helps prevent data loss, ensuring that critical business information remains secure and recoverable, even under adverse conditions. 

For businesses subject to regulations or customer compliance standards that require disaster recovery, an NDRP helps ensure compliance, prevent regulatory action, and avoid contractual penalties.

Knowing that an organization has a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place instills confidence and trust in its stakeholders, customers, and partners, reinforcing the company’s reputation for reliability and preparedness.

Overall, a network disaster recovery plan is an essential part of an organization’s strategy to ensure business continuity , safeguard assets, and maintain a high level of service regardless of circumstances. A robust NDRP limits risk exposure and gets your company back up and running quickly in the event of a cyberattack or disaster.

Steps to Create an Effective NDRP

An effective network disaster recovery plan starts with a team approach, incorporating representatives from IT, individual business units, corporate security, and executive management. Corporate risk and compliance managers play a particularly important role, alongside IT.

Begin by conducting a risk assessment that addresses multiple scenarios, outlining the specific impact that various events could have on your operations. Identify critical assets, including data assets, that are essential to the business.

Establish measurable objectives. Prioritize the assets that are most essential to continued operations, setting realistic recovery targets for each one. You might decide, for example, that restoring order processing capabilities takes precedence over the restoration of marketing systems, or that manufacturing operations for certain core product lines are more important than others.

Define the means by which you will accomplish those objectives, including personnel, assets, and technologies that can support your efforts. By implementing a tiered resiliency architecture , for example, you can achieve near-instantaneous data recovery, using data that is virtually impossible for bad actors to access and erase. A robust recovery strategy hinges on your ability to apply industry-leading technology to your advantage.

Testing and Maintenance of NDRP

It’s critical to review and revise your NDRP regularly. As your technology landscape evolves, and as your organization grows and changes, your disaster recovery plan will need to adapt accordingly.

Regular training and testing are also essential. These activities help identify gaps in the plan and provide practice for the team responsible for implementing it in a real disaster. Consider the various scenarios outlined in your NDRP and develop readiness drills. These may include tabletop discussion-based exercises in which team members talk through specific scenarios, functional exercises that simulate actual disaster scenarios in a controlled environment, or full-scale drills that bring all resources and personnel into action around a highly realistic, simulated disruption.

Your network disaster recovery plan should be reviewed and updated periodically. At a bare minimum, this should take place on an annual basis. However, significant changes to your IT landscape, organizational structure, business operations, or scope should also trigger a review.  Be sure to incorporate feedback from the drills you’ve conducted since the last plan update.

Changes to the risk environment may also indicate the need for review and revision. Plan to continuously monitor and improve your NDRP, with regular testing to ensure its effectiveness.

Many companies already have some kind of disaster recovery plan in place. In too many cases, though, these documents are poorly maintained and are insufficient to fulfill their intended purpose. Today’s world is full of risks, and enterprises are increasingly dependent on sophisticated technology for core operations.

Modernize Your Network Disaster Recovery Plan with Pure Storage

To survive and thrive in a high-risk business environment, it’s critical to invest in an effective NDRP and commit the necessary resources to make it work when it’s needed. If you’re interested in high resiliency, bulletproof data protection, and rapid recovery, contact the team at Pure Storage. We specialize in cutting-edge storage solutions that keep your enterprise going, no matter what. 

Learn more about our disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering, Pure Protect™ //DRaaS , or contact our team today to schedule a demo or talk to a disaster recovery expert .

Written By: Pure Storage

Related Stories

How to Create a Ransomware Recovery Plan

Ransomware attacks continue to increase in frequency and sophistication. See why a ransomware recovery...

IT Orchestration vs. IT Automation: What’s the Difference?

IT Orchestration vs. IT Automation: Let's take a closer look at aeach, what they...

Failover vs. Failback: What’s the Difference? 

Failover and failback are two key concepts in disaster recovery and business continuity. Here,...

How to Deploy a Docker Image with Ansible

In this guide, you’ll find the steps for deploying a Docker image with Ansible,...

Top Stories

Demystifying directflash modules vs. ssds vs. hdds vs. hybrid.

• Phone +1 (855) 356 9768
• Customer Login

Ensuring Uninterrupted Business Operations: The Vital Role of Business Continuity

Posted on August 4, 2023

Emergencies can interrupt normal business practices, and being prepared can mean the difference between a company that thrives or fails during uncertainty. Businesses of every size should prepare for disaster with a business continuity plan to ensure operations continue. A study from Business.com found that 4 out of 10 small businesses fail after a disaster, and another quarter of those that reopen will fail within 24 months of the disaster. If your client or business wants to prepare for the next emergency, accessible and resilient communications are essential to your strategy.

A reliable cloud-based solution can secure your business or client’s mission-critical communications throughout an emergency with minimal interruptions and make restoring normal business functions possible. Consider the risks to the business and how disaster preparedness can ensure business operations continue.

What Is Business Continuity?

Business continuity is a plan or procedure to reduce the risks and impacts of disasters on an organization’s operations. Companies must plan to maintain mission-critical communications and operations during emergencies, preparing for everything from fires and power outages to cyberattacks and pandemics. It is also important to quickly recover and restore normal business operations at a reasonable capacity either onsite or in another location.

Related: Phone Systems and Business Continuity: What Are the Impacts?

If your client or company has been in operation for more than several years, it is probably familiar with the impacts an emergency can have on business. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic forced many companies to operate in a virtual office environment to reduce the spread of the virus. Organizations that were prepared to work remotely with a disaster preparedness plan could limit risks to productivity and normal business operations.

What Risks Can Business Continuity Mitigate?

There are various risks to business operations, and ensuring the company can mitigate them will prepare your client or business to continue operations with minimal interruptions in an outage or disaster. Emergency preparedness should cover the following types of disasters.

Severe weather and natural disasters

Severe weather like hurricanes and blizzards or natural disasters like earthquakes can shut down onsite operations, making it unsafe for employees to come to the office. Prepare the company’s voice and messaging services with a reliable cloud-based solution to ensure inbound calls and messages can be routed or forwarded to remote employees or another office location.

Power outages

Outages can limit onsite systems and communication capabilities. While a generator can help the business restore power onsite, ensuring minimal interruptions to servers and systems and that any data is recoverable with regular backups is critical.

A fire can result in the onsite business location closing for a period and may damage local network infrastructure and systems. The company can prepare for a fire that damages servers with backups of critical systems kept offsite or in the cloud. Businesses should also plan for employees to continue operations remotely after a fire onsite until it is safe to return to the office with a cloud-based communication solution.

Network outages and cyberattacks

Network outages and cyberattacks can limit communications if your business or client has an onsite business phone system. Business operations can continue offsite with a cloud-based solution.

Pandemics and illness

During a pandemic or quickly spreading illness, it may be safer for employees to work from home in a virtual or hybrid office arrangement to minimize the spread. A cloud-based communication solution will allow users to send and receive calls and messages from home using their internet connection and a compatible device.

Facilities issues

Like power and network outages, facilities issues can limit onsite operations. A gas leak, plumbing issue, or HVAC malfunction may require employees to move offsite temporarily. Business operations can continue if your client or company’s communications are accessible remotely.

How Can a Business Continuity Plan Protect Your Business From Risks?

Preparing for disasters is the best way for a company to ensure its business can continue during an emergency. There are several steps that businesses can take to minimize interruptions to operations. While company management will be responsible for developing and executing a business continuity plan, you can assist the organization by choosing reliable and resilient networks for mission-critical communications as a developer.

Identify Your Business Continuity Risks

Identifying risks in your local area or industry is an excellent place to start when creating an emergency preparedness plan. Consider the likeliness of an event occuring in the industry and location where the business operates. An office in a coastal location should prepare for natural disasters like hurricanes and flooding, while tornadoes are a more considerable risk inland. There are also certain risks that every business shares, such as cyberattacks.

A well-made business continuity plan will cover your client or company for a variety of emergencies. For instance, a comprehensive plan to work from home or another office location if employees cannot safely come to the office could effectively prepare the company for a pandemic or a severe weather situation that limits employees’ ability to come to the office. The business should be able to function at normal productivity levels while employees are distributed in a larger geographic area.

Protect Your Onsite Power

Electrical issues and power failures can occur due to infrastructure problems, maintenance, and storms. While ensuring backup power will likely be the responsibility of facilities management, it is crucial to continuing operations. Businesses should have generators and backup power, such as an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for servers and mission-critical systems.

Backup Critical Data

Regular backups should be a part of your disaster preparedness strategy. While cyberattacks on larger businesses make it to the news headlines, StrongDM reports that nearly half of all cyberattacks impact small businesses . 

Ensure your business or clients’ databases and systems are backed up regularly. Data on employee devices for business should also have recent backups, allowing them to be restored after equipment or software failures. Backups should be stored in a secure cloud or a separate location whenever possible to ensure the data can be accessed after a cyberattack or onsite issue.

Migrate Your Network and Communications to the Cloud

Cloud-based systems offer businesses a significant advantage during an emergency. When your company or client’s systems and communication are accessible in the cloud, business operations can continue as normal if employees are required to work from home or another office location. 

A Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone solution and messaging capabilities provided by a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunk can deliver cloud-based communications for a distributed workforce. Users only need a stable internet connection and a compatible device, such as a PC, mobile device, or IP phone, to continue business operations using the company’s cloud-based voice systems.

Train Employees and Communicate Best Practices

In addition to identifying the risks and preparing for emergencies by protecting your client or business’s power, data, and communications, communicating what to do to ensure business continuity during an emergency is vital. While management will be responsible for creating and executing a plan, your cloud-based communication implementation will ensure critical voice and messaging applications continue to function.

Related: What Is Remote Call Forwarding? How It Works and Best Practices for Effective Implementation

It is crucial to ensure the company’s communications will be accessible during an emergency and that operations can continue onsite or remotely. A cloud-based communications system makes it easier for organizations to train employees on best practices and how to access the business phone and messaging systems during a disaster to continue communications and operations with minimal interruptions.

How Can You Ensure Your Business Communications Are Prepared for Disaster?

A cloud-based communication solution provides inherent disaster preparedness, allowing business operations to continue from another location with minimal interruptions. Ensuring your communication solution is hosted on a resilient network with 24/7 uptime and high reliability is vital. A disaster-ready solution will be usable with a variety of devices like mobile phones and PCs, allowing inbound calls to be forwarded or transferred to employees’ remote devices.

Direct inward dialing (DID) allows calls to be routed to the intended recipient without an automated answering system or extension. A redundant network with physical failover will ensure inbound DID calls are delivered to their intended recipient when there is a network failure or interruption. Features like remote call forwarding ensure inbound calls to the business can be quickly forwarded to a remote device.

Prepare Your Business to Overcome Disasters With a Cloud-Based Communication Solution

Voice and messaging solutions from Flowroute provide your client or company with cloud-based communications. The resilient HyperNetwork™ maintains fast, reliable, and secure communications with physical network failover and guaranteed delivery of voice and messages. We deliver 99.999% reliability and 24/7 uptime for your voice and messaging services. Your client or business has secure access to its VoIP, SIP, or messaging service and monitors for threats like toll fraud. Get started with your disaster-ready business communications solution.

Related Articles from Flowroute

Unlock the power of communication with our comprehensive guide on messaging API. Learn everything from basics to implementation for developers and IT leaders.

Discover the key features and benefits of CPaaS solutions, including cost efficiency and enhanced customer engagement, in our comprehensive guide.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, consumers prefer to communicate with local organizations using text, chat, and voice options. It’s critical to offer users the communication channels they prefer for business…

We have updated our Privacy Policy found here. By continuing to use our website, you agree that you understand these policies.

• Download Free Trial
• Vinchin Backup & Recovery
• Vinchin Backup Free Edition

• XenServer/Citrix Hypervisor
• Red Hat Virtualization
• Oracle OLVM
• Sangfor HCI
• Huawei FusionCompute
• H3C CAS/UIS
• Microsoft Azure
• Database Protection
• Ransomware Protection
• GDPR Compliance
• Knowledge Base
• How To Videos
• Software & Documentation
• IT Services
• Telecommunications
• Support Plan
• Contact Support
• Learn How To Buy
• Licensing Policy
• Request a Quote
• Partner Program
• Become a Partner
• Find a Local Partner
• Partner Portal
• About Vinchin
• News & Events
• Customer Stories

• VMware Backup
• Hyper-V Backup
• XenServer/Citrix Hypervisor Backup
• XCP-ng Backup
• oVirt Backup
• Red Hat Virtualization Backup
• Oracle OLVM Backup
• Sangfor HCI Backup
• OpenStack Backup
• Huawei FusionCompute Backup
• H3C CAS/UIS Backup
• ZStack Backup
• Amazon S3 Archive
• Microsoft Azure Archive
• Wasabi Cloud Archive
• MinIO Cloud Archive
• Database Backup
• ● Easily backup popular VMs like VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer, XCP-ng, etc.
• ● Effortlessly migrate VM between different virtualization platforms (V2V)
• ● Comprehensive protection to databases like MySQL, SQL Server, OracleDB, etc.
• ● Integrated enterprise backup solutions for Windows/Linux, NAS, etc.

How to Protect Windows Server with CDP Solution?

2024-05-20 | Nick Zhao

What is CDP?

Why use cdp on windows server.

In today’s age, all kinds of digital systems require the support of the servers in the background. To provide premium services to customers, protecting data and guaranteeing business continuity is the important for protecting brand reputation.

Windows operating system is one of the most popular operating systems used on business servers because it provides user-friendly GUI, abundant useful features, and excellent integration with Microsoft applications.

To protect the performance of Windows server, you need to backup the server data  and compile disaster recovery plan in case of unexpected cases. In this post, you will know learn to protect data on the server and guarantee business continuity with CDP.

Continuous data protection  is an advanced data protection solution working by capturing every change made to data on the Windows server in real-time so you can select any-point-time recovery point to restore data, almost promising 0 data loss.

CDP works by backing up server data and data change and lets you select recovery point when needed so it is like a backup solution, but what’s the difference between traditional backup and CDP?

Traditional backup solution typically creates backup by taking snapshots of the server when the backup job is triggered, which often occurs daily, weekly, or monthly, like Windows Server Backup . In this way, you only have limited recovery points in the list when you restore the Windows server. Although you can set up a short backup interval, there is still data loss between backup intervals.

In contrast, CDP eliminates the backup intervals to let you select any point in time of backup data. If you have used log backup of database, you can find something similar to it because when you restore the database, you can also select the wanted recovery point. However, the log backup is also created periodically, so you might lose the last data but CDP won’t cause that.

With the real-time protection for your Windows server, everything on the server will be well protected.

Prevent Data Loss:  First, CDP is a data backup solution. We all know that backup is the foundation of data security and CDP can backup production data to another storage, so if the server data is lost, you can easily recover data from the backup, ensuring data security.

Ensure Quick Recovery:  CDP can be easily integrated with instant data recovery solutions, making it very suitable for systems that require high business continuity. If it can also be integrated with failover solutions, such as heartbeat detection, the system can be protected with automatic disaster recovery, ensuring extremely high business continuity.

Comply with laws and regulations:  In some industries, business continuity is particularly important, so even if a company is not willing to invest heavily in purchasing CDP solution, regulatory agencies may still mandate to equip critical facilities with CDP solution. Otherwise, the company may face fines. If there are similar regulations in your industry, CDP solutions can help you avoid many losses.

1. How does CDP handle large volumes of data on Windows server?

Although enterprise Windows servers typically store hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of data, as long as the relevant hardware resources are in place, because CDP consumes more resources than conventional backup solutions, professional CDP solutions can easily handle this because CDP consumes more resources than conventional backup solutions.

2. Is CDP compatible with virtualized environments like Hyper-V?

Virtual machines can be easily installed with CDP solution because they are also independent machines. With the CDP agents installed on the virtual machines, all of them can be protected in real-time.

3. Can CDP protect against ransomware?

As long as the backup data is not fully destroyed by ransomware, you can easily restore data to a point before the environment is infected.

CDP is a very suitable data protection solution for Windows server because it provides real-time data protection to guarantee business continuity.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery  is a professional backup and disaster recovery solution for all kinds of workloads like Windows server, Hyper-V VM, VMware VM, Proxmox VM, etc. It is also going to support CDP in May. You can contact our sales  for more information.

Thanks for subscribing! A confirmation mail has been sent to your mailbox, please check within 48 hours.

• VM Migration How to Migrate VMware VM to Proxmox in 2 ways? Posted on 2024-04-28
• VM Backup How to Easily Backup Hyper-V VMs and Hosts in 4 Ways? Posted on 2023-02-11
• VM Backup How to Backup ESXi VMs in 3 Ways? | With Bonus in the End Posted on 2023-01-31
• Disaster Recovery How to Easily Backup PB Size of Data with Vinchin? Posted on 2022-12-22
• Database Tips PostgreSQL vs MySQL: What Are the Differences and When to Use? Posted on 2022-11-11

• Contact Sales