Disaster recovery and business continuity are tightly related. In the 1970s, organizations started preparing Disaster Recovery (DR) plans, which were mainly focused on natural disasters. In the 1980s and onwards, the focus shifted to a more holistic view, named Business Continuity (BC).
While disaster recovery narrowly focused on how to bring systems back online after a disaster, business continuity aimed to develop a proactive process that would keep businesses alive and operating even in the face of a major crisis. Accordingly, a disaster recovery plan is limited to ensuring data protection, preventing damage to systems and recovering them as quickly as possible, while a business continuity plan covers all aspects of the business including business processes, manpower, partners and suppliers.
In this article you learn:
• What is a business continuity plan?
• 7 chapters of a sample business continuity plan
• The difference between a DR and BC plan
• A BC plan in action: hour by hour
• Ensuring business continuity for your data with Cloudian
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity planning focused specifically on restoring IT systems, data, and infrastructure after a disruption. Its goal is to minimize downtime and data loss so critical systems can return to normal operation as quickly as possible.
A disaster recovery plan defines how an organization will recover servers, applications, databases, networks, and cloud services after events such as hardware failure, ransomware attacks, human error, power outages, or natural disasters.
Disaster recovery planning typically includes:
- Recovery objectives—target recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for critical systems
- Backup and replication procedures—how data is copied, stored, and restored
- Recovery environments—secondary data centers, cloud failover environments, or standby infrastructure
- Roles and responsibilities—who performs recovery actions during an incident
- Recovery procedures—step-by-step instructions for restoring systems and validating that they function correctly
- Testing and maintenance—regular drills and updates to ensure the plan works when needed
Disaster recovery mainly focuses on technology systems and operational recovery. Business continuity planning is broader and addresses how the entire organization continues functioning during and after a crisis.
What is a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan details how a business will continue operating and serving its customers, even in the face of a dramatic event like a natural disaster, major IT failure, or a cyberattack. The end goal is to preserve a company’s financial viability, market position, reputation, and customers, even in the face of a crisis.
Business continuity planning covers every aspect of the business including:
- Business processes—how can a process continue working even if critical equipment or supplies were missing?
- Human resources—how can critical staff continue performing their work if, for example, workstations are destroyed or there is no Internet connection?
- Business partners and suppliers—how can suppliers continue their work with the company if, for example, lines of communication or road transport is unavailable?
A business continuity plan must consider important questions and provide good answers. What single points of failure exist in the organization? What are the critical dependencies on equipment, in-house staff, suppliers or other third parties? What workarounds exist for disruption of any of these? Which organizational processes, staff, skills and technology are needed to maintain business operations and fully recover from a disaster?
7 Chapters of a Business Continuity Plan
A typical business continuity plan contains the following sections:
- Goals of the plan—should quantify which parts of the business are considered critical and how smoothly they should be able to operate during a crisis
- Budget—resources allocated to business continuity planning and preparation
- Personnel—who is responsible for maintaining the business continuity program and executing practical steps during a crisis. Which other stakeholders exist—senior management, legal, PR, customers, partners, etc—and how they should be involved or notified.
- Business Impact Analysis—a holistic review of critical business processes, their weak points and how they are likely to be affected by different types of disasters.
- Proactive strategies—processes that should be carried out on a regular basis to prevent or more easily overcome disasters.
- Immediate reactive strategies—what the organization should do at the moment disaster strikes to continue operations. This will typically include temporary measures, for example, delivering electricity using a portable generator while power is out.
- This chapter includes an IT disaster recovery plan.
- Long-term reactive strategies—what the organization should do on “day two”, after the disaster has ended, to fully recover and rebuild systems to their original state.
Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery Plan
Scope: Organization-Wide Continuity vs. IT-Focused Recovery
A business continuity plan has a broad organizational scope. It addresses how the entire business can continue operating during and after a disruptive event. This includes business processes, employees, facilities, suppliers, customer service, legal obligations, communications, and financial operations.
A disaster recovery plan has a narrower scope. It focuses mainly on restoring IT systems, data, applications, infrastructure, and technical services after a disaster. For example, a disaster recovery plan may explain how to restore servers from backups, recover databases, switch to a secondary data center, or bring cloud services back online.
In short, business continuity asks: How will the business keep operating? Disaster recovery asks: How will technology and systems be restored?
Objective: Maintaining Operations vs. Restoring Systems
The main goal of a business continuity plan is to keep critical business functions running with minimal interruption. Even if normal working conditions are unavailable, the organization should still be able to serve customers, communicate with stakeholders, pay employees, process orders, and meet essential obligations.
The main goal of a disaster recovery plan is to restore damaged or unavailable systems as quickly and safely as possible. It is concerned with recovering data, repairing infrastructure, restoring applications, and returning IT services to their normal state.
For example, if a company’s office is inaccessible after a flood, the business continuity plan may define how employees will work remotely and how customers will be supported. The disaster recovery plan will define how affected systems, databases, and networks will be restored.
Timing: Proactive Continuity vs. Post-Incident Recovery
Business continuity planning is proactive. It identifies risks before they occur and prepares alternative ways to continue operations during a crisis. This may include remote work procedures, backup suppliers, alternative communication channels, manual workarounds, crisis management teams, and emergency operating procedures.
Disaster recovery is more reactive. It is activated after a disruptive event has affected IT systems or data. Its purpose is to recover from the damage and return systems to a working state.
This does not mean disaster recovery is unplanned. A good disaster recovery plan is prepared in advance, but its practical execution usually begins once a system failure, outage, cyberattack, or data loss has occurred.
Business Areas Covered: People, Processes, and Partners vs. Technology and Data
A business continuity plan covers all critical elements required to keep the business functioning. These include people, processes, buildings, equipment, vendors, logistics, communication channels, customer relationships, and decision-making structures.
A disaster recovery plan focuses on technical assets. These include servers, storage systems, databases, networks, applications, endpoints, cloud environments, backups, and cybersecurity controls.
For example, a business continuity plan may include instructions for relocating staff, informing customers, using alternative suppliers, or prioritizing essential services. A disaster recovery plan may include backup restoration steps, recovery scripts, system dependencies, and technical escalation procedures.
Responsibility: Executive and Cross-Functional Teams vs. IT and Security Teams
Business continuity usually involves senior management and multiple departments across the organization. Operations, human resources, finance, legal, communications, customer support, procurement, and executive leadership may all have defined responsibilities.
Disaster recovery is usually led by IT, infrastructure, security, DevOps, or technical operations teams. These teams are responsible for restoring systems, validating data integrity, testing backups, and ensuring applications are available again.
Because business continuity affects the entire organization, it requires business-level decision-making. Disaster recovery requires deep technical expertise and detailed knowledge of the organization’s systems.
Metrics: Business Tolerance vs. Technical Recovery Targets
Business continuity planning often uses business-oriented measures. These may include maximum acceptable downtime for business processes, minimum service levels, customer impact, financial losses, regulatory exposure, and reputational damage.
Disaster recovery planning uses more technical recovery metrics. The two most common are Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective. Recovery Time Objective defines how quickly a system must be restored. Recovery Point Objective defines how much data loss is acceptable, measured in time.
For example, the business may decide that online ordering must continue within two hours of a disruption. The disaster recovery plan then translates that requirement into technical recovery actions, such as restoring databases, switching traffic to a backup environment, or activating a failover system.
Output: Operational Procedures vs. Technical Recovery Procedures
The output of a business continuity plan is a set of practical procedures for keeping the business running. These may include emergency roles, communication plans, alternative work arrangements, supplier substitution plans, customer notification templates, and process workarounds.
The output of a disaster recovery plan is a set of technical procedures for restoring systems. These may include backup schedules, server recovery steps, application restart sequences, network failover instructions, access control procedures, and validation checklists.
A complete continuity strategy usually requires both documents. The business continuity plan provides the overall operating strategy during a crisis, while the disaster recovery plan supports that strategy by restoring the technology needed for normal operations.
Relationship: Disaster Recovery Is Part of Business Continuity
Disaster recovery should not be seen as separate from business continuity. Rather, it is one important component of a broader business continuity program.
A business cannot continue operating effectively if its critical systems, data, and applications are unavailable for too long. At the same time, restoring IT systems alone is not enough if employees cannot work, suppliers cannot deliver, customers are not informed, or business processes are not adapted to the crisis.
Therefore, the best approach is to treat disaster recovery as the technical foundation of business continuity. Business continuity defines what the organization needs to keep operating, and disaster recovery defines how the required technology will be restored to support those needs.
Ensuring Business Continuity for Your Data with Cloudian
Cloudian offers low-cost disk-based storage that lets you store up to 1.5 Petabytes of backups. The Cloudian appliance can be deployed in your local data center, or in a remote DR site. We provide integrated data management tools that let you store data seamlessly to a remote appliance.
Cloudian also supports a hybrid cloud setup. The Cloudian appliance can replicate your data to a cloud storage service such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage or Google Cloud Storage. This allows you to backup data frequently and enjoy fast local access while keeping a copy of data on the cloud in case the on-premise data center goes down.
Learn more about Cloudian’s data protection solutions.
