With the renewed focus on management accountability and business governance, as well as the potential threat of intentional sabotage and terror related activity, business continuity has become a key issue at the board level. Consequently, Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) have become a standard part of the business vocabulary and are major concerns for both private businesses and the public sector.

Many organizations view business continuity as a technology issue to be solved with redundant servers, disk mirroring, and data backups. These organizations fail to understand that technical solutions are only a small piece of the business continuity puzzle. Business continuity it is about developing a business process contingency plan – determining, from a business perspective, the processes necessary to ensure essential services and personnel are available internally and externally in times of crisis or emergency.

Continuity planning involves all the elements (safety and security of personnel and maintaining integrity of critical infrastructure: physical plant, communications systems, IT systems, and business data) necessary for the organization to enable business critical processes to continue functioning during a crisis.

Recovery planning involves both the short-term measures for immediate recovery and partial restoration of services and longer term measures to provide full restoration of services in the event of a crisis or disaster. The ability to manage a crisis, while ensuring essential services and supporting technologies are available, key people are on hand, and business critical information is accessible to ensure the business can continue to operate is key.