Protecting your organization’s data is integral. If your company were to lose its data, it’s a fair bet to assume you’d be unable to operate. Every aspect of the business, including what you owe customers, what they owe you, inventory, production, analytics and just about every other aspect of your business would be gone.

There is no question that you must have disaster recovery and business continuity solutions in place and you have to know how to balance the two. This balance will depend on the type of business you are operating as well as other considerations such as to how much security and the costs you can absorb.

Disaster recovery strategies are established so that everyone on the team knows precisely what is expected of them for the business to recuperate in case of a natural or man-made disaster. When an earthquake strikes, you either activate your DR plans or profoundly regret not having put one in place. From an IT perspective you should backup all data at a third party so that you can restore it as soon as you have a possibility of doing so.

A good DR plan means backing up the data in a completely separate location and possibly a different city, and it entails frequent backups so that you have the latest data available should disaster strike.

Business continuity planning is much more thorough. A short stoppage in operation can threaten the entire enterprise. A regular, high-volume stream of records entering the system always mandate a business continuity plan.

BC must be implemented at many points. For example, superfluous servers, superfluous storage, even superfluous data centers may be essential to deliver sufficient availability to backing true continuity of the business. If something can fail it must be backed up, even employees and the office location itself. This obviously overlays with DR.

This is why you see people confusing the two terms. Continuity means everything is available at all times which means being able to be back up and running immediately after a disaster.

The tricky part is to protect your assets without over spending. To determine just how much your particular business should spend, you have to conduct a cost benefit analysis by assessing the worth of each data asset and creating a plan to protect it. You then compare the cost of every plan vs the worth of that asset to determine your budget.