Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)

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.

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.