There is no better time to learn about the terms “Business Continuity” and “Disaster recovery” than in these COVID times. It is also easier to understand these two terms in light of the current situation for businesses.
There are many natural calamities in the world like earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and now the COVID 19 virus that is wreaking havoc world wide. What do these natural calamities and disasters do to businesses? They often stump businesses and most of the business owners struggle with how to move forward This is where the concepts of “business continuity” and “disaster recovery” step in.
Business continuity:
How do I get my business up and running when I am struck by hurricanes, earthquakes, man made disasters or the COVID 19 virus is the thought behind ‘Business continuity plans’.
Business continuity is getting a business to run as the disaster is unfolding.
Each business’s business continuity plan will be different. While small businesses do not need an elaborate business continuity and disaster recovery plan, the bigger businesses definitely need a properly thought out plan.
Even though, many books tout different steps in business continuity, these are some broad steps that can be adopted when conducting a ‘Business Continuity’ plan.
a. Conduct a ‘Business Impact analysis’ (this is to understand the time sensitive and critical part of businesses)
b. Formulate recovery strategies(perform gap analysis between recovery requirements and current situation)
c. Plan for recovery(write down the business recovery procedures and plan accordingly)
d. Test the business continuity plans (train the business teams for recovery strategies)
(Source: https://www.ready.gov/business-continuity-plan )
‘Business continuity’ is what most organizations are doing today in these COVID times. In order to run their business, most organizations are adopting a ‘remote working model’ and asking their employees to ‘work from home’ .
As an example, you can read all about Oracle’s business continuity plan in these COVID times here
Disaster recovery:
Businesses have to imagine grueling conditions such as terrorist attacks, man made and natural disasters and have to prepare to get their business up and running normally after the disaster. This is ‘disaster recovery’.
‘Disaster recovery’ is getting the business to run normally after the disaster has taken place.
Even though ‘disaster recovery’ is similar to ‘business continuity’ – they are fundamentally different. While ‘business continuity’ is running the business as the disaster is taking place, ‘disaster recovery’ is running the business normally after the disaster has taken place.
In the current COVID conditions, ‘disaster recovery’ for organizations will take place after the infections decrease in their respective area and country.
We saw a brief review of ‘business continuity’ vs ‘disaster recovery’ in this post. Stay tuned for the next comparison post tomorrow…
The previous post can be found here.
Nice post!
A very fine post on how to keep businesses running during times of disaster.
Thank you, Jai!