BCDR stands for business continuity and disaster recovery. This term aggregates the strategy and the collection of approaches that business needs to implement in order to keep at least mission-critical functions up and running during and after any unplanned event or a disaster.
And the number of such unplanned events and disasters has only been growing during the past decade; human mistakes, natural disasters, and fires, ransomware attacks, and the recent disease outbreak are all forcing business leaders to take business continuity planning seriously.
In this article, we will define the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery, talk about why BCDR is an excessive term, and define how business continuity and disaster recovery basics should be used in practice.
Table of Contents
Prior to the year 2020, many IT professionals saw business continuity concept as an enterprise-only collection of policies, strategies, and other paperwork-and-meeting, C-level nonsense. These IT professionals were only focused on recovering the IT infrastructure or on data recovery. However, due to the pandemic, a lot of businesses were forced to move their workloads from offices fast, and continue to work from their homes. Few were ready for such a sudden change in the business landscape, and the IT pros suddenly found themselves solving a number of unexpected questions, such as:
Business continuity concept is aimed at answering such questions. It comprises a strategy, a number of policies, and plans that should minimize the risk of disruptions in any event. More specifically, business continuity includes:
Disaster recovery is a set of actions that need to be undertaken in order to recover the IT infrastructure of the company to a working state. Typically, the concept of disaster recovery is included in business continuity. From the strategic and planning point of view, disaster recovery is quite similar to business continuity and includes a disaster recovery strategy and a plan.
To develop a disaster recovery plan, you should first develop the granular key recovery metrics for the IT infrastructure of the organization – recovery time and recovery point objectives. These metrics define acceptable downtime and acceptable data loss respectively. By granular, we mean that these metrics should be developed for different IT infrastructure subsets on an individual basis.
Further reading Disaster Recovery FAQ: Essential Definitions for IT Pros and MSPs
Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are similar in that both are important for protecting a business from unexpected events that could cause disruption of operations. But they are distinct concepts. Disaster recovery is a key element of business continuity, which explains key difference between business continuity and disaster recovery:
The point in time. With business continuity, the company typically focuses on the processes during and right after a disaster, while disaster recovery is geared towards processes happening after an emergency.
Span difference. Business continuity concept includes a long-term strategy for the company to reduce downtime, while disaster recovery eliminates the exact risks during a set period of time (RTO and RPO).
As we have stated earlier, BCDR is an excessive term. You already know that business continuity includes disaster recovery; hence, there is no need to separate business continuity from disaster recovery and then group them into a single term. This will only create terminological chaos.
From a practical point of view, it is best to define business continuity as the package of strategies, policies, and practices to keep the business afloat including disaster recovery. And disaster recovery, as an integral part of business continuity, should address all IT-related questions.
The landscape and the understanding of the business continuity for the masses is changing all the time. Previously, the business continuity concept was popular among enterprise-grade companies or those who worked in locations with a high chance of natural disaster. These companies developed resilience and disaster recovery plans.
Here's what you should include in the BCDR plan:
On paper, the business continuity concept is a mess of half-technological and half-business-related terms, policies, strategies, and teams. However, once you get a clear picture of business continuity vs disaster recovery difference, and once you apply business continuity and disaster recovery basics to your unique case, you will be able to work out a continuous approach to safeguarding your or your clients’ businesses from downtime.
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