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Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery

When talking about business continuity and disaster recovery, many organizations use the two phrases interchangeably. Although many of the strategies overlap, there are some distinct differences between your business continuity and disaster recovery platforms. In this post, we’ll clarify those differences and discuss the important role each plays in protecting your business operations.

What’s the Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

The fundamental differences between business continuity and disaster recovery strategies are in terms of scope. The primary focus of a disaster recovery platform is getting your mission-critical network operations back up and running as quickly as possible following an outage. Overall, the goal of disaster recovery is to minimize the amount of downtime you experience following a disaster so your business can stay on track to achieve your goals.

The primary focus of a business continuity platform, on the other hand, is restoring regular network operations after an outage. Business continuity strategies include restoring tools that, while not critical to day-to-day operations, are still an essential part of running your business.

As a real-world example, a disaster recovery platform generally covers essential tools your team relies on to do their jobs, like VoIP and the internet, while business continuity addresses tools such as printer operations and fax systems.

Timeline Differences

Because disaster recovery strategies emphasize restoring the tools your team needs to do their jobs, the recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) are generally much shorter than with business continuity strategies. While the effectiveness of your disaster recovery platform may be measured in terms of minutes or hours, business continuity platforms are more frequently measured in days or weeks, depending on the cause of a network outage.

Understanding Your Operations

If your organization is looking to develop a platform that protects your network operations, you need to begin by clarifying which systems and tools your team relies on most. The next step is defining which disasters pose the most significant threat to your operations. If you need help understanding which tools are critical to your organization’s workflows, partnering with a team of risk management experts is the way to go.

Without in-depth insights into how your team works and the tools they rely on to succeed and grow your business, your organization will be left floundering following a disaster. On the other hand, with practical strategies and plans in place, your team can get your business back up and running sooner than you thought possible.

The Business Continuity Experts

If your organization needs some help developing a more robust disaster preparedness platform, contact the experts at Bizco today. We’ll work with you to gain insight into your team’s workflows and clarify the systems they depend on most for day-to-day operations. From there, our team works with yours to develop a business continuity and disaster recovery solution around your unique needs and goals.

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