Terms ‘Business Continuity Plan’ (BCP) and ‘Disaster Recovery Plan’ (DRP) are being used interchangeably in information security management. These terms, though related, have the following differences:
- BCP is the act of planning to keep the business going even when an unexpected event happens. Let us take the case of fire in a building, BCP focuses on continuing the business from another location. Whereas DRP is a set of steps and processes involved in restoring a business to its original normal operation mode. DRP assumes that something has happened to disrupt business and its time to start things back up again. In this example, the DRP gives out the steps of how to move to the building which is destroyed by the fire and resume operations as it was before the fire happened.
- BCP is a pro-active strategy. It helps prevent and anticipates a disaster or unfavourable incident in advance whereas DRP is a strategy that treats or recovers from disasters.
- BCP brings under its ambit all functions of a business from personnel to production to supply chain to information technology. In terms of a hierarchical view, BCP is at the top. Below it is the DRP. DRP focuses on technology recovery while BCP focuses on financial and operational aspects as well. DRP is the process an organization uses to recover access to their software, data, and/or hardware that are need to resume the performance of normal, critical business functions after the event of either a natural disaster or a disaster caused by humans.
Comments are closed.