Redundancy, disaster recovery, business continuity - what's the difference?

01 December 2004

Defining the differences between disaster recovery, redundancy and business continuity can be confusing. Knowing what you should implement for your own organisation can be even more of a puzzle. 

Put simply, redundancy and resiliency are elements built into a solution which attempt to prevent outages.  Disaster recovery is complete (or partial) duplication of infrastructure that becomes active when the solution is unavailable for an extensive period of time. 

Standards Australia defines business continuity management as providing “the framework for an organisation to achieve sustainability. It assists organisations to sustain good corporate governance; helps maintain customer base, market share, and public image; and assists market growth.”

CITEC provides clients with redundancy and resilience within key services.   In the past, we have focussed on developing our business continuity and various disaster recovery plans particularly in the lead up to Y2K and for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting originally scheduled to be held in Brisbane in 2001.  These plans have recently been updated and combined under a business continuity management program.

Business continuity planning is a whole of business approach, which does not focus purely on IT, but highlights the critical objectives of a business.  It involves regular risk management review and business impact analysis which point to continuity and mitigation strategies. 

These strategies then inform the processes that are documented in a disaster recovery plan (a document which describes a single function) and a business continuity plan (an overarching document, describing what happens at a business level).

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