Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery: How They’re Different and Why They Matter

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Keeping your doors open after a disaster is critical, and business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning are both central to that effort. People often use the terms disaster recovery and business continuity interchangeably, but they describe two different approaches to protecting your business. 

The problem when people conflate these two concepts is that they might assume they have both plans in place when in fact they’ve only addressed one. In this article, we’ll clarify what sets apart business continuity and disaster recovery planning and explain why your business ultimately needs to invest in each of them. 

What Is the Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery? 

Although the answer depends partly on who you ask, the basic difference between business continuity and disaster recovery comes down to scope.

A business continuity plan focuses on all aspects of disaster planning as it relates to preventing an interruption to business operations. A disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, focuses more specifically on the response and recovery stages of a disaster, especially with regard to IT systems. 

To clarify what makes these plans unique, let’s look at each of them individually:

• A business continuity plan (BCP) refers to a series of protocols designed to ensure the business can continue operating during a disruptive event. In simpler terms, a BCP aims to answer the question, “How can we keep the business running if disaster strikes?”
• A disaster recovery plan (DRP) refers more specifically to the steps and technologies for recovering from a disruptive event, especially as it pertains to restoring lost data, resolving infrastructure failure, or troubleshooting other technological components. This plan aims to answer the question, “How do we recover from a disaster?”

These two types of plans also have separate goals. A business continuity plan is a strategy that should minimize disruptions in the event of a disaster. A disaster recovery plan has a narrower objective: restoring your critical data and applications if something damages or destroys your software, hardware, or data center. 

Why You Need a BCP and DRP

Businesses face a wide variety of threats that can impede their ability to function. At any given moment, one of those emergencies could make it difficult or impossible for your business to function, which is precisely why business continuity and disaster recovery planning are so critical. 

Potential Threats to Modern Businesses

The type of disasters you could experience depend on the structure, size, and location of your business. Some of the most common risks include: 

• Fires
• Floods
• Tornados
• Earthquakes
• Hurricanes
• Malware
• Cyberattacks 
• Ransomware
• Accidental data deletion
• Internal sabotage 

If this list of possible emergencies makes you nervous, that’s probably a good thing. Recognizing and appreciating the fragile nature of operating a business is one of the most significant motivators for businesses to invest in business continuity and disaster recovery planning. 

Possible Damage From Disasters

When businesses neglect to develop and implement strategic plans, they run the risk of financial losses, reputational damage, and even permanent closures. The danger is especially pronounced for small businesses. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), almost half of small businesses that experience a disaster never reopen, and an additional 29% close within 2 years after the event. 

Without detailed plans for preparing for such a disaster, businesses are setting themselves up for failure and increasing the chances that they’ll never recover. 

Statistics That Prove the Importance of Disaster Planning 

No matter the size of your organization, a single disaster could have devastating effects. These statistics show exactly how serious the risks and consequences can be: 

• A 2023 study of businesses worldwide found that an unplanned outage costs a typical business nearly $125,000 per hour. The survey also found that more than two-thirds of industrial businesses suffer unplanned outages once a month or more. 
• According to a study conducted by the Uptime Institute, 60% of organizations experienced downtime at least once from 2020 to 2023. Among those businesses, more than a third rated their outage as significant, serious, or severe. 
• COVID-19 is a prime example of the impact that a large, unexpected disaster can have on businesses that haven’t properly prepared. As recently as March 2022, more than 2 million people were unable to work because their employers closed or lost their businesses during the pandemic. 

These are just a few of the many business continuity statistics that underscore the importance of having both a disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan.  

Overlaps in Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

It’s important to understand the differences between a business continuity plan vs disaster recovery plan, but perhaps even more essential is understanding how these two documents hinge on each other and play a connected role in maintaining continuity.

Keep in mind that a comprehensive business continuity plan should include a built-in disaster recovery plan. Think of the BCP as the master document that encompasses all aspects of your disaster prevention, mitigation, and response, including both tech-focused and non-tech recovery protocols. In short, you can’t have an effective business continuity plan without also addressing disaster recovery. 

If this overlap is muddying the waters a bit, don’t worry. We’ll take a closer look at each plan to clear things up. 

What’s Involved in Business Continuity Planning

A business continuity plan is a broad document designed to keep your business up and running when you experience a disaster. It focuses on your business as a whole, while also drilling down to very specific scenarios that create risks for your operations.

Addressing Critical Needs

Generally speaking, business continuity planning revolves around the critical operations that your organization needs to get back to business after a disruption. If your team follows the plan correctly, you should be able to provide services to customers during or immediately after a disaster with minimal downtime or service interruptions. The plan also focuses on the needs of business partners and vendors.

Your business continuity plan should also identify what your organization needs to resume normal operations, such as: 

• Critical supplies 
• Employee contact information 
• Lists of crucial business functions 
• Copies of important records 

These are the bare essentials that you need to recover quickly following a disaster. However, even that doesn’t fully describe everything that will go into your business continuity plan. 

Managing Every Aspect of Disaster Preparedness 

Your BCP should serve as the single, multifaceted document for managing all ends of disaster preparedness at your organization:

• Prevention: Steps and systems to prevent certain disasters from occurring in the first place.
• Mitigation: Processes to limit the impact of disasters when they occur.
• Recovery: Protocols for restoring operations as quickly as possible to limit downtime or other adverse consequences.

These are broad categories that need to be defined individually for each possible disaster scenario. 

Writing Your Business Continuity Plan

To develop a business continuity plan, you need to gain a better understanding of the unique risks for your organization and how those events will impact the business in terms of downtime, costs, and reputational damage.

As such, a typical business continuity plan usually requires the following sections:

• Contact information: Contact details for those who developed the BCP and key recovery personnel within each department
• Plan objectives: The overall objective for the plan, what it aims to accomplish, why it’s critical, and what areas it focuses on
• Risk assessment: A thorough evaluation of disaster scenarios that could disrupt your operations, prioritized by likelihood and/or severity of impact
• Impact analysis: Specific outcomes for each disaster scenario in terms of how much they negatively impact the business, including the costs for idle workers, recovery, and hardware repair or replacement
• Prevention: Steps and systems for preventing each disaster, such as the implementation of antimalware systems to prevent certain cyberattacks
• Response: How the business should respond to each disaster to minimize impact and initiate a rapid recovery, such as restoring backups after a data loss
• Areas for improvement: Any weaknesses identified in the creation of the BCP, along with recommended solutions and steps for filling these holes
• Contingencies: A list of secondary backup assets and/or protocols, such as a backup office location or equipment
• Communication: Protocols for staying in communication with recovery personnel and all employees, such as a text alert system, company extranet, or calling trees

Remember that your plan is an evolving document that you should update periodically to reassess risks and incorporate any changes that you’ve made. 

What Goes Into Disaster Recovery Planning

You can think of a disaster recovery plan as a more granular component of your business continuity plan. It often has a very specific focus on your business’s data and information systems. 

Prioritizing IT Needs

Data loss is a constant and severe threat for virtually every business. A disaster recovery plan is designed to safeguard that data and ensure you can recover it if you experience a disaster. As a result, disaster recovery planning generally centers on the needs of your IT department. 

Depending on the type of disaster, the plan could involve everything from recovering a small data set to the loss of an entire data center. Since most businesses are increasingly reliant on information technology, the disaster recovery plan is an important part of business continuity planning.

Expanding the Definition of Disaster Recovery Planning

A disaster recovery plan can also refer to protocols that are outside the realm of IT. For example, the plan could include steps recovery personnel can take to secure a secondary business location and resume critical operations. It could also include guidance for how to restore communication between emergency staff if primary lines of communication are unavailable.

In other words, disaster recovery planning does not always have to be strictly IT-focused, though it often is. If your IT personnel are creating an IT-focused disaster recovery plan, make sure that all non-IT recovery protocols are included within the larger BCP documentation.

What to Include in a Disaster Recovery Plan

A disaster recovery plan is essentially the “Response” component of your business continuity plan. It encompasses all the procedures, technologies, and objectives necessary for completing a quick recovery after a disaster. This recovery could pertain to lost data, damaged hardware, network outages, or application failures.

Here are some crucial points to cover within your disaster recovery plan:

• Recovery technologies: This covers all systems currently implemented—or those that should be—to support the recovery process. An example is a data backup and disaster recovery system that enables you to recover critical files that have gone missing or large datasets that have been infected with ransomware
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Your RTO is a desired timeframe for completing recovery, which you can apply to the business as a whole or individual layers of IT, like data recovery. For example, an RTO of 30 minutes would mean that your team should recover or restore all data within 30 minutes after discovering a loss.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The RPO refers to the desired recovery point for restoring data from a backup to minimize the amount of data loss. For instance, if your RPO is 6 hours, your last backup would never be more than 6 hours old, so the longer your RPO, the more data you might lose in the event of a disaster. 
• Recovery protocols: Your DRP should clearly define the roles of your recovery personnel so there’s no confusion and not a minute wasted when disaster strikes. In the case of a data recovery, you’ll need to identify who oversees it, what they do, who they communicate with, and how they share updates with other personnel.  
• Vendors, suppliers, and other third parties: Identify the third parties that you need to contact if a disaster occurs, such as IT providers, telecommunications companies, or other external providers that will support the recovery process. For example, in case of an Internet outage, your DRP should identify your Internet provider’s emergency contact information—ideally a specific point of contact—to ensure a faster resolution.
• Recovery testing: Describe how often and what method you’ll use to conduct periodic disaster recovery tests and mock disaster scenarios that confirm your recovery systems work as they should. You might perform a data recovery test to determine whether backups are readily available and you can restore them without integrity issues. 

Like your business continuity plan, you should also periodically update your disaster recovery plan to ensure all the information is still accurate. In addition, remember that a thorough business analysis should play a part in dictating the information in your disaster recovery plan. This includes the risk assessments and impact analyses from your overall continuity planning.

Backup & Disaster Recovery

One of the best strategies in disaster recovery planning is to keep all of your data backed up on a server at a secondary site. This way, if a disaster occurs at the primary site, you’ll have access to a backup of all your vital data. A good disaster recovery plan will outline how you manage and access data from the secondary site as quickly as possible.

For example, in the case of hybrid-cloud backup systems, you have several recovery options available. If a disaster occurs at the primary site, you can restore data from the cloud or boot the entire backup as a virtual machine. The virtualization method allows for instant access to data and applications while a full recovery is in process. These backup systems exist for small businesses with more limited budgets.

Ultimately, the reliability of your disaster recovery plan is dependent on everything you’ve included in the plan: all the infrastructure, processes, planning, and testing.

Never Go Without a Plan

Being prepared for a disaster is one of the most important things a business can do to prevent costly downtime—or permanent closure—when a disruptive incident occurs. The experts at Invenio IT can help you explore the technology your organization needs for business continuity, data backup, and disaster recovery. Schedule a call with one of our data protection specialists to discover your options. 

Frequently Asked Questions

1) What’s the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity?

The main difference is that a disaster recovery plan is more focused on the procedures for recovering from a disaster, especially in regards to IT systems, while a business continuity plan focuses on the bigger picture of preventing all operational disruptions. Disaster recovery planning is typically considered a subset of business continuity planning.

2) Which comes first, business continuity or disaster recovery?

Business continuity planning comes first because it’s the foundation of a business’s disaster planning. There’s no chicken or the egg mystery here—you can’t effectively plan your disaster recovery until you know what disasters you might experience. Continuity planning will identify the primary threats to a business through a risk assessment and impact analysis, and you can use those assessments to inform your IT disaster recovery planning. 

3) What is an example of a business continuity strategy?

One example of a business continuity strategy is creating frequent data backups that can be restored in case files are deleted, destroyed, or lost. This strategy involves using a dependable business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) system that enables frequent backups and prompt restore methods.

4) What is business continuity and disaster recovery?

Business continuity and disaster recovery (or BC/DR) refers to the systems and procedures that help a business continue operating through a disaster. The term is commonly used in reference to data backup and recovery systems, but it can apply to other IT systems as well.