Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery
When we go out to talk with departments and campuses, we hear the terms business continuity and disaster recovery used interchangeably. We are trying to raise awareness that these terms are NOT the same.
Using industry standard terminology and definitions, we use the Disaster Recovery Journal's glossary for both Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.- BUSINESS CONTINUITY: The ability of an organization to provide service and support for its customers and to maintain its viability before, during, and after a business continuity event.
DISASTER RECOVERY: The technical component of business continuity planning
Penn State's Business Continuity Plans include both Service Recovery Plans, plans that recover critical university functions and Disaster Recovery Plans, the plans that recover the technology functions for these critical services.
The priority of Services at the university is determined from the Business Impact Analysis. Once the services are identified and prioritized, the technology is identified which supports these services.
In the past, most people focused on disaster recovery plans. They felt if they had plans for the technology, they didn't need anything else. Recent events, however, proved that kind of thinking has many drawbacks. Technology is just a piece of the overall plan. Communicating with your stakeholders, having work around procedures and creating policies for employees to follow during an outage are critical to sustain university business. In a world of 24/7 operations, our customers expect minimal inconvenience during an unanticipated outage.
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Another reason why people focused so much on Disaster Recovery and why it was tossed into the lap of technology people was due to the findings of the initial Risk Assessment.