What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery (DR) is, or should be part of your Business Continuity plan. It is defined as the way of recovering from a disturbance to, or a destructive incident in, your daily operations. In the context of Information Systems and Technology, this means that if an incident completely destroys data, slows down productivity, or causes any other major interruptions of your operations or your business, the process of reverting to normal operations with minimum outage from that incident is called Business Continuity. Disaster Recovery is, or should be, a part of that process.

You could say that Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery go hand in hand, but they do vary depending on the area and subject. For example, if your WAN connection goes offline, it means that your business units can no longer communicate via email or share documents with each other, although each local unit can still operate and continue to work. This scenario would definitely be outlined in your Business Continuity Plan. However, if your server room burns down in one location, the rebuilding of the server room and the data housed in it would be Disaster Recovery.

The problem with Disaster Recovery is that the approach varies for different domains and applications. Also, the urgency and criticality vary across areas and subjects. A lot of companies have a very superficial Business Continuity plan, if they have any plan at all, and have Disaster Recovery plans that are just as superficial. A visual outline of a sample Business Continuity plan is shown below:

As you can see, DR is only a part of the greater picture. It is, however, one of the most crucial parts that many IT departments forget, or decide to overlook. Some even seem to think that DR is not an important step at all.