- Business Continuity (BC) v.s Disaster Recovery (DR) - A Definition
Business continuity (BC) refers to the ability of a business to continue functioning both during and after a disaster — natural or man-made — so their operations appear uninterrupted to employees and customers.
Whereas disaster recovery (DR) focuses on getting a business back up and running as soon as possible after a disaster, business continuity is about working to ensure a business never actually goes down, at least from the customer point of view.
Despite their philosophical differences, DR is still an important component to business continuity. Business continuity, in fact, can be thought of as taking DR a step further. An organization can have both a business continuity plan and DR initiatives on the books, as they're closely linked.
Business continuity can be thought of as an allencompassing, pre-troubleshooting diagnostic process intended to identify potential disaster scenario threats to an organization. Based on those diagnostic findings, a business establishes a framework designed to build improved resilience and safeguards to better respond to disasters and ensure the interests of its customers and stakeholders are met. Just as importantly, it helps protect the company's reputation.
Although zero downtime is the ideal target of business continuity, companies also must recognize that disasters, by their very nature, are unpredictable. Witness recent hurricane Irene or the freak October snowstorm. As such, business continuity plans should also recognize the inevitability of some sort of downtime and plan accordingly to limit — to the best of a company's ability and resources — the duration of that downtime and to build redundancies into their system so layers of backup exist.
Business continuity plans should be fluid rather than strict guidelines for disaster and post-disaster operations, meaning the plans must allow for continual input and evolution. Input should be sought from everyone within an organization, from the bottom up, as disasters can affect every functioning aspect of a company's operations, not just the businesscritical areas.
Business continuity planning should result in a formal, documented handbook or manual that can be referenced prior to, during and following disasterrelated business disruptions. The manual or handbook should be available in hardcopy since a disaster may render electrical access to softcopy documentation impossible.
Business continuity approaches can scale according to the size and complexity of an organization. For smaller organizations, a reference manual may simply consist of staff and vendor names, phone numbers and addresses, as well as the locations of any possible remote data backup and storage. For larger enterprises, a business continuity reference may contain detailed information about a secondary, or tertiary work site, complex IT requirements and readiness procedures, work recovery processes, reporting requirements, procedures for re-establishing existing — and establishing.
The Business Value
In today's world of 24/7 business uptime, most companies can't afford to be offline for a single hour, even in the event of a disaster. Business continuity means business viability, in many cases. Business continuity is more than just maintaining a planning manual. It also means equipping your business with the hardware, software and personnel that can best weather a disaster scenario as laid out in your manual. Hardware can include generators, industrial-level batteries and other backup power supplies. Software can include diagnostic and "selfhealing" applications, and other software components that make up what's called an "intelligent infrastructure," that can respond proactively during a disaster scenario, usually faster than most administrators and other personnel.
Business continuity also means maintaining a reliable off-site data backup and recovery location, whether it's maintained by the company itself or a third-party service provider such as CSSD-SIRIS. Ensuring data is routinely backed up and readily available following a disaster is one of the most important components when it comes to preventing, or at least limiting potential downtime. A permanent loss of large amounts of data can cripple a business.
The importance and scope of a business continuity plan, as stated, depends on the size and complexity of a given business. For those businesses unsure as to where to start developing a business continuity plan may call Computer Systems Support & Design at (203) 349-8047 Ext 211 to get started.
