Various organizations and enterprises implement Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies to make sure their operations are not hampered in the event that disasters take place in their region. For businesses and huge firms, these two programs are now a need.
BCP
As the name suggests, a BCP is a long-term strategy that entails developing and testing a plan that explains how a business will continue to operate amid an unexpected disruption of services and operations. In the event of a flood, power loss, fire, or cyberattack, BCP is a proactive plan to create a disaster preparedness and recovery system. It is a strategy to maintain continuity before, during, and after disruptive events like natural catastrophes. BCP focuses on the actions and procedures needed to maintain the organization’s vital business operations in order to prevent a complete loss for the firm. It involves controlling the organizational operational components that enable a corporation to run regularly and produce income. Standards are applied, processes are set up, and recovery systems that can result in quick mitigating steps are implemented.
Disaster recovery, or DR, is concerned with the steps businesses will take in the wake of a natural disaster or its effects on people. Its sole goal is to keep businesses operational, i.e., to make sure they can continue doing so even in the event of emergencies like power outages, computer viruses, or theft. The BCP solely includes this catastrophe recovery plan.
The Difference Between a BCP and a DRP
A BCP is a strategy to guarantee business continuity before, during, and after disruptive events like natural disasters. Offering a long-term strategic perspective, it enables the development and testing of a strategy to guarantee the continuity of crucial business processes inside a company. A DRP is a strategy for minimizing the effects of a disaster and recovering crucial IT systems. It should be implemented right after business continuity operations. It necessitates a more tactical approach to handling unplanned events than BCP.
Disaster recovery is regarded as a subset of BCP, although the two have different objectives; the former relates to the firm as a whole, while the latter is primarily focused on information technology. These two processes will eventually converge at some point. While DRP focuses on particular areas of the organization that support regular IT operations, BCP focuses on the operational components of an organization that enable normal business operations. The two plans are inherently connected even if their scopes are different.
Planning for business continuity is taking a series of actions to quickly and efficiently resume regular business activities in an organization in the event of a natural disaster. Assessing and managing risk, creating a planning committee, prioritizing recovery requirements, involving top management, creating and carrying out a plan, testing the plan, analyzing the results of the tests, and business continuity phase are some of these stages.
Recovery, continuity, and prevention are the three main goals of DRP. Creating a disaster recovery plan, identifying and assessing disaster risk, identifying mitigation measures, figuring out the maximum tolerated downtime (MTD), conducting a criticality analysis, developing key recovery objectives, managing telecommunications and tools, defining recovery strategies, and finally bringing the system online are the phases of a DRP.