Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are terms that are very often used interchangeably by various areas of a business. It is however important to realise that there are distinct differences between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.
Business Continuity touches on all life-areas of a business to ensure that every vital aspect of a business is able to continue functioning in some capacity in the event that normal working conditions are unable to be met. These conditions are commonly addressed in planning as “Business Continuity Scenarios” and each Business Continuity scenario will require different actions to enable restoration of the business function affected.
Typical Business Continuity Scenarios include:-
- Adverse Weather – Flooding, Heavy Snow, Extreme Wind Speeds
- Power and Communications Outages – Power cuts, severed telephone and Internet connectivity
- Inaccessible Buildings – Due to terrorist acts, human error (locked out), gas leaks and other potentially dangerous working conditions
- System and hardware failures
Any one or combination of these Business Continuity Scenarios mean that the normal working functions of a company can be affected and the impact of this should be mitigated. The role of Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is to understand these risks and plan for each accordingly. It could be argued that the practice of Business Continuity is commonly driven from a requirement for a Disaster Recovery Plan, usually a task deemed to be the responsibility of the IT Department.
The practice of Business Continuity Planning delves much deeper into understanding the subsequent “knock-on” effects that outages of a Business function can have whereas Disaster Recovery concentrates on the tactical methods of restoring service interruptions and the testing of these methods.
Disaster Recovery Examples include the following tactical approaches;
- Server hardware recovery
- Data recovery from damaged hard disks
- Document Restoration
- Re-routing of telecommunications