Business Continuity Series: Is Business Continuity the Same as Disaster Recovery? (Video)

Jason Kuhn, CIO at 3coast, addresses the common misconception regarding business continuity and disaster recovery by clarifying the different aspects of a business that each plan pertains to.

2 thoughts on “Business Continuity Series: Is Business Continuity the Same as Disaster Recovery? (Video)

  1. Hello Jason, I suggest the BC vs DR planning, comes down to how valuable is each process in the target business. I deal with CIO’less companies and its unbelievable to me how much server(production&hosted&virtual) sprawl there is. Let me give you another perspective:

    Here is my short version of how I would explain to a CIO’less company:

    As it relates to IT, it’s important to clarify immediately that Disaster Recovery Planning does not equal “Business Continuity Planning. Lastly DR AND BC can move out of IT into many other real concerns, like suppliers and key employees. I will stick to IT for our discussion.

    A Business Continuity Plan insures a vital process or applications is available to user(s) that use the process within a specific target RTO. This RTO can ranges from seconds to minutes, but never hours, days or weeks. A business should determine which processes/applications are ‘VITAL” and which ones are not. The ones that are not “VITAL” can be protected with a reasonable DR Plan on a sliding VALUE scale. Further, I would clarify to a business that an untested plan is neither a DR OR BC PLAN. The CEO should identify, update and review each business process as it relates to the the DR or BC plan………..TEST regularly, If your scared to test, then you have no DR or BC PLAN.

    Have a great day, I would enjoy a one on one with you some day… I think I could offer some valuable tools to you, and maybe you to me.

  2. Mark

    You are right in so many ways. Your first point is CRITICAL, DR does not equate to BCP.

    The challenge in producing a blog item such as this is defining what constitutes being “on point”. It does seem that DR winds up being defined as the mechanics of protecting a subset of the organizations needs/interests. Specifically, it winds up focusing on whatever is near and dear to the specific sponsor or practitioner.

    My experience confirms that any organization receives great value from thinking themselves through the process of developing a Business Continuity Plan because as you point out, it does surface the critical elements. When I initially got involved in doing BCP/DR planning I was surprised at how few options actually needed to be engineered. I quickly discovered that designing to protect a few critical processes wound up addressing a significant percentage of the organization’s processes and needs.

    I’ve found that CIOless organizations are challenged by the absence of knowledge of how to develop DR/BCP plans and are often severely constrained in terms of staff time for participating in the exercise. It makes these projects challenging but I’ve also discovered that the executive sponsors feel they learn a lot about key components of their companies.

    Jason

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