Both plans deal with disruption, but they answer different questions.

Business continuity (BC)

“How does the business keep operating during a disruption?”

It covers people, processes, facilities, suppliers, and communication, not only IT. Examples:

– Alternate work locations or remote work arrangements

– Manual procedures if systems are down

– Communication plans for staff and customers

– Backup suppliers and key contacts

– Priorities for which functions restart first

Disaster recovery (DR)

“How do we restore our technology after an outage or loss?”

It is the technical part: restoring servers, data, networks, and applications. Examples:

– Backup and restore procedures

– Replication to a secondary site or the cloud

– Order of system recovery

– Roles and runbooks for the IT team

How they relate

Disaster recovery is a component of business continuity. A business can have excellent IT recovery and still stall because nobody knows who to call, where to work, or how to take orders without the system.

Start with a business impact analysis

1. List critical business functions

2. Identify the systems and people each depends on

3. Estimate the cost of downtime per hour or day

4. Set recovery targets (RTO and RPO)

5. Rank priorities

What a good plan includes

– Clear roles and contact lists

– Documented procedures

– Backup and recovery tools matched to targets

– Alternative ways to work

– Communication templates

– A schedule for testing

Test it

Run a tabletop exercise or restore test at least yearly. Plans that were never tested rarely work as written.

DBR Soft helps businesses build and test practical continuity and recovery plans. Contact us for more information.