Business Continuity Plan vs Disaster Recovery Plan: What's the Difference?

Are you comparing a business continuity plan vs disaster recovery plan? The terms are often used interchangeably and are related, but they represent distinct aspects of an organization's preparedness for disruptions. The team at Entech regularly provides suggested strategies for preparing these plans to our clients. 

Here's a breakdown of the key differences between the two:

Business Continuity (BC) Plan 

This plan focuses on maintaining essential business functions and processes during and after a disruptive event. It also: 

• Addresses a broad range of potential disruptions, including natural disasters, cyberattacks, equipment failures and human errors.
• Aims to ensure that critical business operations continue to function with minimal interruption, enabling the organization to deliver products and services to clients, preserve its reputation and minimize financial losses.
• Involves comprehensive strategies and procedures for risk assessment, business impact analysis, incident response, crisis management and recovery strategies tailored to the specific needs and objectives of the organization.
• Emphasizes the resilience and adaptability of the organization as a whole, encompassing not just IT systems but also people, processes, facilities and external dependencies.

Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan

 A disaster recovery plan focuses specifically on the recovery and restoration of IT systems, data and infrastructure following a disruptive event. This plan also: 

• Is typically triggered by events that cause business disruptions, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, hardware failures or software glitches.
• Aims to minimize downtime, data loss and service disruptions by quickly recovering IT systems and infrastructure to a functional state.
• Involves technical strategies and procedures such as data backups, replication, failover mechanisms, system restoration procedures and testing protocols to verify the effectiveness of recovery strategies.
• Emphasizes the availability and integrity of critical IT services and data, enabling the organization to resume normal operations as quickly as possible after a disaster.

Creating a BCDR Strategy 

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

Let’s look at two terms that are relevant to both:

• Recovery time objective (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 BC plan or DR plan. 
• Recovery point objective (RPO) is the amount of data your business 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.

Comparing Business Continuity Plan vs Disaster Recovery Plan 

While business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans are closely related and often work in tandem, they represent different aspects of an organization's preparedness for disruptions. As the name suggests, business continuity (BC) involves maintaining essential business functions and processes no matter what happens. Disaster recovery, on the other hand, focuses specifically on the recovery and restoration of IT systems and infrastructure. The key is to put these two together in order to form a comprehensive framework for mitigating the impact of disruptions and ensuring your organization can carry on without missing a beat.

If your organization needs help creating these plans, reach out to our expert team members. We can provide clarity on creating both plans and how to have them work in tandem.