Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery. What Is the Actual Difference?
Average reading time: 9 minute(s)
People use these two terms as if they mean the same thing. They do not. Business continuity and disaster recovery are related, they overlap in places, and they are often managed together but they have different goals, different owners, and different timelines.
Mixing them up leads to real gaps in your planning. You can end up with a solid IT recovery process and no plan for keeping your team operational, or a broad business continuity plan (BCP) with no technical procedures behind it. Either way, something breaks when a real incident hits.
II. What Is Business Continuity?
Business continuity is about keeping your organization running during a disruption. It does not wait for things to go wrong. It puts processes in place ahead of time so operations can continue even when conditions are abnormal.
The scope goes well beyond IT. Business continuity covers HR, facilities, communications, customer service, finance, and supply chain. If a flood makes your office inaccessible, your business continuity plan (BCP) determines where staff work, how customers get served, and who is authorized to make decisions.
Preventative Planning
A BCP is written before any incident occurs. It identifies critical functions, documents workarounds, and assigns responsibilities across every department. The goal is to reduce the impact of disruption rather than simply react to it.
Business continuity also requires regular review. Processes change, staff turns over, and vendors come and go. A plan that reflects how your company operated two years ago may be useless today.
III. What Is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery is focused specifically on restoring IT systems, data, and infrastructure after a disruption. It kicks in after something has already gone wrong. It is reactive by nature.
A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a technical document. It tells your IT team what to restore first, how to restore it, and in what order. It defines your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) so the team has clear targets rather than guessing under pressure.
Technical Procedures
A DRP typically includes step by step runbooks for each critical system. These runbooks cover how to spin up backup servers, restore data from the most recent backup, validate that systems are functioning correctly, and confirm security has not been compromised.
The IT disaster recovery strategy also covers infrastructure redundancy. That means failover servers, cloud backups, offsite storage, and tested restore procedures. Without these, the runbook is just a list of things you wish you had.
IV. Side-by-Side Comparison
| Factor | Business Continuity | Disaster Recovery |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Keep operations running | Restore IT systems and data |
| Scope | Whole organization | IT infrastructure and data |
| Ownership | Operations, HR, leadership | IT department |
| Timeline | During a disruption | After a disruption |
| Key documents | BCP, communication plans | DRP, system runbooks |
| Tools | Manual workflows, alternate sites | Backups, failover systems, cloud |
| Focus | People and processes | Technology |
Business continuity vs disaster recovery comes down to this one distinction. Business continuity asks “how do we keep functioning?” Disaster recovery asks “how do we restore what broke?”
Both questions matter. Neither one replaces the other.
V. Real-World Scenario Breakdown
Ransomware Attack Example
In May 2021, Colonial Pipeline was hit by a ransomware attack that forced the company to shut down 5,500 miles of pipeline along the U.S. East Coast. The attack caused fuel shortages across multiple states and the company paid approximately $4.4 million in ransom. The full story is documented here: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57112371
That attack had two layers of damage. There was the technical layer (encrypted systems, locked data) and the operational layer (staff unable to work safely, customers without service, regulators demanding answers). A BCDR framework addresses both.
What Business Continuity Covers in This Scenario
The business continuity plan handles the operational side. It defines who communicates with customers and regulators, how staff operate on manual or alternate systems, and what decisions leadership can make without normal IT access.
In Colonial’s case, a solid BCP would have included pre-approved communication scripts for regulators and the public, pre-negotiated alternate supply routes, and escalation procedures that did not rely on compromised systems.
What Disaster Recovery Covers in This Scenario
The disaster recovery plan handles the technical side. It tells the IT team which systems to isolate, which backups to restore, and how to verify the environment is clean before bringing systems back online.
A well tested DRP with a short recovery time objective (RTO) means the IT team is not improvising. They know exactly what to do in what order. In a ransomware scenario, every hour of delay costs money and customers.
VI. How They Complement Each Other
Business continuity and disaster recovery share one major objective, get the organization back to normal as fast as possible with as little damage as possible. They approach that objective from different angles.
A BCDR framework brings both plans together under one umbrella. The business continuity plan keeps staff productive while IT works on restoration. The disaster recovery plan restores systems so normal operations can resume. They run in parallel, not in sequence.
Integrated Planning
When these two plans are built separately and never coordinated, you get conflicts. The BCP might assume systems will be restored in four hours. The DRP might have an RTO of 12 hours. That gap means your business continuity assumptions are wrong, and your staff will be operating on outdated workarounds longer than expected.
Integrated planning closes these gaps. Your recovery point objective (RPO) informs how often backups run, which informs how much data loss your BCP workarounds need to account for. Everything connects.
VII. Risks of Treating Them as the Same
Gaps in Coverage
When organizations treat business continuity and disaster recovery as interchangeable, they usually end up with one or the other. Most often, they have a disaster recovery plan because IT drove the process, and assume it covers everything.
It does not. A DRP has nothing to say about how your call center operates without CRM access, how payroll runs if HR systems are down, or who handles customer escalations when the team is working remotely. These gaps only become visible when a real incident occurs.
Increased Downtime
Without a business continuity plan running alongside the disaster recovery effort, your organization sits idle while IT works. Staff have no direction. Customers have no answers. Revenue stops while systems are restored.
According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is approximately $5,600 per minute for large enterprises. https://blogs.gartner.com/andrew-lerner/2014/07/16/the-cost-of-downtime/ Keeping operations partially running during that window reduces the total financial hit significantly.
Compliance Issues
Many regulatory frameworks require documented, separate plans for both business continuity and disaster recovery. HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and ISO 22301 all have specific requirements around business resilience strategy and documentation.
If you treat them as one plan and regulators audit your documentation, a single merged document may not satisfy either requirement. That can mean fines, failed audits, and lost certifications.
Pros and Cons of Merging BC and DR Into One Plan
| Pros | Cons | |
|---|---|---|
| Merged plan | Easier to manage one document | May fail compliance audits |
| Less duplication | Unclear ownership between IT and operations | |
| Faster to write initially | Gaps appear under real incidents | |
| Separate plans | Clear ownership per domain | Requires coordination to keep aligned |
| Meets regulatory requirements | More documentation to maintain | |
| Gaps are easier to spot | Needs integrated testing |
VIII. When to Prioritize Each
Startups
A startup with five people and a SaaS based stack does not need a 40 page crisis management plan. But it does need to know what happens if its primary cloud provider goes down, if a key person leaves suddenly, or if a security breach exposes customer data.
Start with the basics. Document your most critical systems, set a simple recovery time objective (RTO) for each one, and identify who is responsible for what during an incident. Even a one page document is better than nothing.
Small Businesses
Small businesses are the most vulnerable and the least prepared. A 2019 FEMA study found that 40% of small businesses never reopen after a major disaster. https://www.fema.gov/media-library/assets/documents/89240
At this level, a business continuity plan (BCP) often matters more than a full disaster recovery plan (DRP) because small businesses are more likely to be hurt by people and process failures than purely technical ones. Focus on communication plans, alternate work arrangements, and vendor backups before diving deep into IT recovery procedures.
Enterprise Organizations
Large organizations need both, fully developed and regularly tested. An enterprise with 10,000 employees across multiple geographies cannot wing it. A BCDR framework with documented RTOs, RPOs, tested failover systems, and trained response teams is table stakes at this scale.
Enterprise risk management planning also requires cross department coordination. The IT disaster recovery strategy needs to align with operations, legal, HR, and communications. Each group has a role and needs to know what that role is before an incident, not during it.
Recommended BCDR Investment by Organization Size
| Organization Type | BCP Priority | DRP Priority | Testing Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Startup (1 to 10 people) | Basic | Basic | Annually |
| Small business (10 to 100) | High | Moderate | Annually |
| Mid-market (100 to 1,000) | High | High | Every 6 months |
| Enterprise (1,000 and up) | Full program | Full program | Quarterly |
IX. Frequently Asked Questions
Can you have disaster recovery without business continuity?
Yes, technically. Many organizations have a disaster recovery plan (DRP) with no corresponding business continuity plan (BCP). IT teams build these plans, they solve a real problem, and they work for what they cover.
The issue is what they do not cover. A disaster recovery plan restores your systems. It does not tell your customer service team what to do while those systems are being restored. It does not define who authorizes emergency spending. It does not address how your business communicates with clients during an outage. Those gaps hurt, and they hurt fast.
Is one more expensive than the other?
It depends on your organization. A disaster recovery plan tends to have higher upfront costs because it requires actual infrastructure. Offsite backups, failover servers, cloud replication services, and testing environments all cost money.
A business continuity plan is less expensive to build but harder to maintain. It requires ongoing reviews, employee training, and cross department coordination. The cost is more in time than in technology. Over a three to five year horizon, both investments end up comparable when you factor in testing, updates, and staff time.
Cost Comparison Snapshot
| Component | Business Continuity | Disaster Recovery |
|---|---|---|
| Primary cost driver | Staff time and training | Infrastructure and tooling |
| Upfront investment | Low to moderate | Moderate to high |
| Ongoing cost | Moderate (reviews and training) | Moderate (storage and licensing) |
| Testing cost | Low (tabletop exercises) | High (live failover tests) |
| Compliance value | High | High |
Sources referenced in this article
BBC News, Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack coverage: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57112371
Gartner, The Cost of Downtime: https://blogs.gartner.com/andrew-lerner/2014/07/16/the-cost-of-downtime/
FEMA, Small Business Statistics After a Disaster: https://www.fema.gov/media-library/assets/documents/89240
