The definitions that people have for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are all over the map. The confusion makes consulting on BC/DR interesting, to say the least. These terms do have standard definitions.
Definitions
Business Continuity is the actions a business takes to maintain key business processes in the face of a large scale outage. Business Continuity is holistic. It covers people, processes, and technology. Ideally, it is a managed as an ongoing concern. Such a Business Continuity Program will regularly review potential events (disasters or emergencies), assess the impact of such events, develop recovery strategies to meet these event, and perform regular testing.
Disaster Recovery is the actions that select business units perform to maintain IT systems and services in the face of an outage. While Business Continuity is holistic, Disaster Recovery is very specific. As a subset of the BC, DR concerns the IT applications, servers and equipment. BC identifies the critical business processes. DR identifies the enabling systems.
Misconceptions
I have heard a few misconceptions about the relationship between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. Here is some of what I have heard, and the correct interpretation.
“Our Disaster Recovery is that piece of equipment right there.” DR is not a backup library, a server, or rack space at a facility. These may be resources in a recovery strategy used for a specific critical business process.
“Business Continuity is just really fast, really good Disaster Recovery.” It is one thing to recover, another to continue. Right? However, DR is a portion of a BC program.
“We have Business Continuity for the business systems (ERP or back office systems) and Disaster Recovery for our IT systems.” The rationale goes that IT that directly supports the business gets Business Continuity and IT that does not gets Disaster Recovery. The reality is that the business has two different recovery strategies: a faster strategy for ERP, a slower less expensive strategy for general IT.
“We used to have Disaster Recovery and then we bought XYZ and now we upgraded to Business Continuity.” There is a vendor whose sales people are making these claims. The reality is that the upgrade improves your recovery metrics by reducing your recovery time. But you still have a DR product.
In summary, Business Continuity is the overall program that encompasses all aspects of maintaining a business in the face of disasters. Disaster Recovery is the part of Business Continuity that deals specifically with restoring IT systems and services.