Disaster Recovery Is not Business Continuity
Disaster recovery is not the same as business continuity.
The impact to the business of an application failing is a major part of continuity planning, and data recovery is a piece of that.
(Recovery Time Objective) Hours or days to restore system
———————————————–X—————————————————
(Recovery Point Objective) States of data prior to disaster
If the above line represents the time line of a disaster recovery plan, the X represents the time of a business-critical application failure. All points right of the X are the hours or days needed to restore the system (RTO) and all points left of the X is the states of data prior to the disaster to which the system could be restored.
The first phase of any business continuity planning is to list all the applications being used and to categorize them by their importance to the business.
The next step is to protect the applications and their data stores — beginning with the most critical.
Disaster recovery is the process by which you resume business after a disruptive event. The event might be something huge-like an earthquake or the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center-or something small, like malfunctioning software caused by a computer virus.
“Business continuity planning” suggests a more comprehensive approach to making sure you can keep making money.
Disaster Recovery and/or Business Continuity determines how a company will keep functioning after a disruptive event until its normal facilities are restored.