Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are both part of a solid plan to ensure the safety and survival of your business. Business Continuity is about having a plan in place that allows your business to continue operating in the event of a major disruption, while Disaster Recovery is about how the IT aspect of your business recovers from that disruption or disaster (and so is a key component of your Business Continuity Plan). There are many third-party vendors who provide services related to disaster recovery – it may be best for you to consider going with one these companies if budget allows.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity is key for any IT environment. In order to ensure that you have the most effective plan in place, it is important to consider how long you can stand to be without access to your data or an application (RTO, or recovery time objective) and how much data you can stand to lose (RPO, or recovery point objective). Typically for core business applications there will be a hot or warm standby, which can be failed over to with no or minimal disruption, and a cold standby for data and applications that are less business critical. A crucial part of the DR and BC strategies is performing simulation exercises to validate that RPO and RTO targets are being met, and reporting accurately on the results.