Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery: What You Need To Know

Introduction

Have you ever had a disaster at your business? If so, you know how important it is to have a business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place. A disruption in your workflow could be costly, but if you’ve prepared ahead of time and know exactly what to do when these types of events happen, then all is not lost!

What Is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is a plan to get your business back up and running after a disaster. It’s not just about IT; it’s about getting the entire organization up and running again, as quickly as possible. Disaster recovery can take many forms, depending on the nature of the disaster, but most often involves having duplicates of all critical systems in place somewhere else so that when you need them again–and hopefully you won’t–you can simply switch over from one location to another.

The goal of this process is to minimize downtime by moving operations from one site or facility to another while minimizing risk during transition (for example: ensuring uninterrupted power supply).

What Is Business Continuity?

Business continuity is the ability to recover from a disaster. It’s a process that involves planning for and responding to incidents that threaten an organization’s ability to deliver products or services.

When you think about it this way, business continuity can be applied in many different ways:

• You may have heard of disaster recovery (DR) before. This is another term for business continuity–but it focuses on specific types of incidents, like natural disasters like hurricanes and floods. DR also includes man-made disasters like terrorist attacks or power outages caused by accidents at nearby factories or electrical substations; these are considered “external threats.”
• Disaster recovery plans include strategies for recovering from external threats as well as internal ones (like fires). These plans often involve updating emergency contact lists with phone numbers for key personnel outside your company who might be able to help if something goes wrong at headquarters–and making sure those people know what steps need taken in order for them take over responsibilities such as accounting tasks until everyone comes back online again after whatever incident occurred has been resolved

How Can You Achieve Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

Business continuity and disaster recovery are two separate things. However, they’re often confused because they both involve keeping your business running in the event of a disaster.

Business continuity is a plan to keep your business running in case an emergency occurs. For example, you could have a backup power source that allows you to keep operating even if there’s an outage at your primary location. Disaster recovery (DR) is the process by which you recover from damage caused by an unforeseen event such as fire or flood. It includes getting back up and running after any kind of disruptive incident–not just those related directly to natural disasters like hurricanes or tornados but also those caused by human error such as theft or sabotage

Business continuity and disaster recovery are not the same thing, but they are related.

Business continuity and disaster recovery are not the same thing, but they are related.

Business continuity is about keeping your business running after a disaster. Disaster recovery, on the other hand, is about getting your business back up and running after a disaster. You need both of these things if you want to have an effective business continuity plan (BCP).

Disaster recovery is one subset of BCP–the part that deals with restoring systems after they’ve been damaged or destroyed by an event such as fire or flood. Businesses usually don’t think about this aspect until it’s too late; however, if you have a proper DR plan in place beforehand then recovering from any type of disruption will be much easier than without one!

Conclusion

Now that you know the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery, you can better understand how they work together. Business continuity refers to your ability to keep running operations in the event of an emergency situation like a fire or flood. Disaster recovery refers specifically to protecting data against natural disasters like hurricanes or tornadoes that can destroy building infrastructure needed for normal operations. These two concepts may seem similar at first glance but there are important distinctions between them; namely that business continuity is always necessary while disaster recovery only comes into play when certain conditions are met such as: