Definition — What is Business Continuity?

Business continuity is the process to minimize the risk of disruption. The core concept of Business Continuity is a defined strategy that includes every facet of your organization and details procedures for maintaining business availability. In other words, it is about making proactive and reactive plans to help your organization avoid crises, disasters, and to resume business at the earliest. Some common event that affects Business Continuity are:

• Security breaches
  

• Human error
  

• Natural disasters
  

• Power outages
  

• Equipment failures 
  

• Sudden staff departure
  

• Network Disruptions
  

Business Continuity is important for organizations of any size, However, it might be impractical for large organizations to maintain all functions for the duration of a disaster. According to many experts, the first step in Business Continuity planning is deciding what functions are essential and allocating the available budget accordingly. Once crucial components have been identified, administrators can put failover mechanisms in place. Technologies such as disk mirroring enable an organization to maintain up-to-date copies of data in geographically dispersed locations, not just in the primary data center. This enables data access to continue uninterrupted if one location is disabled and protects against data loss.

Often people think a Disaster Recovery (DR) is the same as Business Continuity, However, DR focuses mainly on restoring an IT infrastructure and operations after a crisis. It's actually just one part of a complete Business Continuity plan, as a BC looks at the continuity of the entire organization.