Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

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What Does Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Mean?

Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR or BC/DR) is a set of processes and techniques used to help an organization recover from a disaster and continue or resume routine business operations. It is a broad term that combines the roles and functions of IT and business in the aftermath of a disaster.

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Techopedia Explains Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

BCDR is divided into two different phases/components:

  • Business Continuity (BC): BC deals with the business operations side of BCDR. It involves designing and creating policies and procedures that ensure that essential business functions/processes are available during and after a disaster. BC can include the replacement of staff, service availability issues, business impact analysis and change management.
  • Disaster Recovery (DR): DR is primarily focused on the IT side of BCDR. It defines how an organization’s IT department will recover from a natural or artificial disaster. The processes within this phase can include server and network restoration, copying backup data and provisioning backup systems.

Typically, most medium and large enterprises have an integrated BCDR plan or separate BC and DR plans for dealing with unforeseen natural or man-made disasters.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.