Disasters can surround your business, whether it’s a cyber-attack, power outage, flood, or any kind of disruption. In such harsh conditions, it is ideal for your business to consider a Business Continuity (BC) or Disaster Recovery (DR) plan.

Both strategies work differently from each other, but the common goal here is to safeguard your business in such disruptive conditions, however both solutions are not interchangeable in any way. In this article we discuss the difference between BCP and DR and how they are useful to your organization.

Business Continuity Planning vs Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity is a type of plan where organizations can run their operations to perform all the business tasks even in a disruptive condition. It is a type of backup plan that gets activated after a disaster to help your employees to work without any interruption with safe and secure access to data. It will make sure that you have proper access to servers, network connections, applications, phones, and information systems without facing any downtime issues. Every business asset will be considered in your business continuity plan such as employees, way of communication, office technology, your buildings, your contracts, etc. The whole idea lies on a single question that, how can I assure that my business will run safely in a disruptive condition?

While on the other hand, disaster recovery is a process of getting everything recovered after a disaster have been occurred. It includes the investigation process to know the root cause of the disaster and then finding a solution so it will no longer be a risk in the future. The data is stored off-site, and the IT infrastructure of your whole business is recovered. Unlike Business continuity planning, the main focus is not to run business operations. The recovery time objectives (RTOs) are used to estimate the time it will take to recover your affected services and products after a disruption. The businesses are advised to follow the RTOs to prevent any further disruptive escalation. You can call disaster recovery as a subset of business continuity.

Dependency on Each Other

Business Continuity is a framework, and disaster recovery is just a unit of it. Disaster recovery is essential, along with business continuity.  Wise organizations or businesses will utilize both of the strategies for better operations. The overlapping of both strategies is obvious: Business Continuity plans are designed according to the RTOs. In the meantime, businesses have to find the best possible way to operate without their servers during the RTO. A business continuity plan is a complete strategy, while disaster recovery is utilized to recover your data. To make BCP more effective, we balance both strategies to maximize protection.

What’s Best for your Business?

If your business operations and processes mainly take place online, then data protection should be your priority. You can still utilize a disaster recovery strategy to recover your data. If you want your operations to be properly working, then you can balance both BCP and DR strategies to keep your system running smoothly.

In short, you cannot have a business continuity plan without a proper disaster recovery plan. If both strategies are not actively working together, then they can expose your business to multiple disruptive escalation risks. So, it is recommended to utilize both of these strategies in case of any disaster because if you have no access to your data, then all your operations will ultimately shutdown.

If you are considering to implement a Business Continuity Plan or looking for assistance to set up Disaster Recovery procedures in case of threats, you can contact us here.

I-Net Dynamics is a IT Infrastructure Specialist firm with decades of experience in assisting companies create and implement solutions that enhance and protect your business processes and operations. As one of the few IT providers with a full-fledge of services, we have an edge over other BCP vendors in Singapore. Contact us today to speak with us.