(And How IT Support in Houston Can Help Organizations Implement Both)
What is Business continuity?
Business continuity planning often begins with Business impact analysis (BIA). This practice helps organizations identify potential impacts on their workflows and resources that can be caused by a disruption or incident. It involves determining the impact on business continuity, legal, and contractual obligations, consistency with regulatory frameworks, revenue-generation capabilities, intellectual property valuation, and physical damage and harm. The process also consists of having emergency response strategies to resume business as soon as possible. This can be accomplished by protecting core systems and applications, telecommunications systems, online services, and servers. The plan should enable an organization to get these core systems back up quickly so that productivity can be maintained after a disruption. An effective Business continuity plan must further include alternatives to maintain normal levels of customer service in case of major disruptions. Experts at IT Support Houston are well-versed in end-to-end management of business continuity for organizations of varying sizes.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery refers to the process of restoring an organization’s business operations following a natural disaster or other catastrophic events. The recovery process should always include the identification of critical business assets—that is, those systems and data most essential to the organization’s operations and recovery. A team of specialists should develop a plan for data recovery in the event that this information is lost or compromised. This may include backing up data on an external storage device, storing copies of critical files on a separate server, or sending copies of certain documents off-site for safekeeping. The disaster recovery plan should also be tested regularly to ensure that all steps function properly under real-world conditions. Finally, all new technology implemented into an organization’s infrastructure must be thoroughly tested before it’s put into use to ensure that it does indeed improve performance and enhance the quality of services provided to clients. IT Consulting Houston offers extensive resources for local businesses trying to put in place an effective BCDR plan.
Why Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Matter
Business continuity outlines exactly how a business will proceed during and following a disaster. It may provide contingency plans, outlining how the business will continue to operate even if it has to move to an alternate location. Business continuity planning may also take into account smaller interruptions or minor disasters, such as extended power outages.
Disaster recovery refers to the plans a business puts into place for responding to a catastrophic event, such as a natural disaster, fire, act of terror, active shooter, or cybercrime. Disaster recovery involves the measures a business takes to respond to an event and return to safe, normal operation as quickly as possible.
Differences Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Key Difference #1: Goals
Disaster recovery involves implementing strategies to help a company resume normal operations following a disruption. Business continuity focuses on maintaining business functions for extended periods after a disruption, typically with reduced resources and capabilities. The two plans work together to ensure that a company can preserve its core business functions following an incident that disrupts normal operations.
Key Difference #2: Different skillsets required from people in charge
Business continuity focuses on maintaining company operations in the event of a disaster or disruption, while disaster recovery focuses on restoring damaged systems to full functionality. Because disaster recovery often entails some level of experience with the systems being restored, personnel involved in that process may possess different skills from those involved in business continuity training. To ensure that a company can recover from adversity as quickly as possible, it’s important that all department members receive training before an event occurs.
Key Difference #3: Incident Size
Disaster recovery plans focus on restoring business operations after a major disruption, such as a natural disaster. Business continuity plans address smaller incidents, such as security breaches and minor power outages. If damage is potentially catastrophic, however, the company will need to contact a reliable IT service provider like Disaster Recovery Houston.
