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

Continuity keeps the business operating. Recovery restores the technology. Both matter.

Business continuity is the plan for keeping the business operating during a disruption. Disaster recovery is the plan for restoring the technology afterward. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity. Most companies have some version of the second and almost none of the first.

Business continuity

Asks: if the office is inaccessible, the phones are down, or the systems are encrypted, how do we keep serving customers, paying people and meeting obligations? It covers people, facilities, vendors, communications and processes, not just IT. Typical contents:

  • The critical business functions and who owns each.
  • Manual or alternate ways to perform them for a period.
  • Where people work if the office is unavailable.
  • Key vendors, partners and customers to notify, with contacts.
  • Communication plans for staff and customers.
  • Critical records and where copies live.

Disaster recovery

Asks: how do we get the technology back? Backups, replication, failover, restore order and recovery objectives. See what is disaster recovery and what are RTO and RPO.

How they fit together

Business continuity sets the requirements (this function must run within four hours); disaster recovery meets them (this system fails over to Azure in one). Continuity planning is logistically complex and involves multiple partners; DR is the IT-specific piece. Together with an incident response plan, which covers the first hours of a security event, they form the full picture.

A practical starting point for a mid-sized business

  1. List the five functions that would hurt most if they stopped for a day.
  2. For each, write down the systems, people and vendors involved and a workaround for 48 hours.
  3. Set RTO and RPO for those systems and confirm the DR plan meets them.
  4. Walk through one scenario a year with the people involved.

Business continuity and disaster recovery planning are part of the strategic work Mentis Group does with Fully Managed IT clients, and reliable communications and cloud access are a large part of what makes continuity possible.

Have a question about your own environment? Schedule a consultation with Mentis Group or call (866) 901-7808.