Disaster Recovery is a subset of Business Continuity. While the goal of Business Continuity is to minimize or eliminate the amount of downtime experienced after a disruptive event, thereby increasing the resilience of the business, Disaster Recovery deals with the process of storing and saving data for the purpose of recovering it on the occasion of said disruptive event.

The subtle differentiator between the two is that the Business Continuity plan will provide a pathway for employees and customers to experience little to no downtime, while the Disaster Recovery plan will provide a guideline to restoring data lost though downtime is less of a metric than integrity of recovered data, which is paramount.

The details that go into a Disaster Recovery plan include what data is to be saved, how and where. Since the goal is to save and protect the data so that it is always available, no matter the event, the standard practice is to backup data to a remote site in addition to locally. This allows for recovery should the disruptive event that causes the data loss also make the office no longer accessible. When putting together your Disaster Recovery Plan be sure you and your IT team include all stores of data and devices. Laptops are often overlooked and the data locally stored on those systems is left vulnerable to permanent loss.

A Business Continuity Plan is not complete without a Disaster Recovery Plan. If you have do not have either or only a Business Continuity Plan, work with your IT team to put together a Disaster Recovery Plan that will protect your valuable data and meet the objectives of your Business Continuity Plan.