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Business continuity and disaster recovery are not synonyms
Organisations frequently believe they have continuity because they have a disaster recovery plan. The overlap is real and partial.
Facts checked — 2026-09-11
What is the difference between continuity and disaster recovery?
Disaster recovery is about restoring technology: failover, backups, recovery procedures, the infrastructure side of an outage. It is necessary and it is usually the part that exists.
Business continuity covers the organisation: people and whether they can work, premises, suppliers, communications with customers and regulators, and who has authority to make decisions while normal governance is disrupted. IT recovery is one input to it, and a DR plan presented as a continuity plan is the commonest gap in this area.
The bottom line
Ask what happens to your customers, your staff and your suppliers during the outage. If the plan only answers for servers, it is a DR plan.
Related services
ISO 22301 — Business Continuity Management
Know which activities cannot stop, how long they can be down, and what you will actually do — tested before you need it.
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