Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan Overview: How They Differ and Fit Together
October 28, 202611 min readHina Khan
Disaster Recovery PlanDisaster Recovery
A business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan are two parts of the same defence, and organisations need both. The business continuity plan (BCP) keeps critical work going when something disrupts normal operations. The disaster recovery plan (DRP) restores the technology and data that work depends on. If a ransomware attack takes your systems offline, the DRP is how you rebuild them, and the BCP is how you keep serving customers in the meantime. This overview explains what each plan covers, how they differ and connect, which related plans sit around them, and which standards and regulations matter in the United States and Australia. For a step-by-step method to build them, see our business continuity and disaster recovery plan guide for teams.
1. The Short Answer
● A BCP is about the business: people, processes, premises, suppliers, and communications needed to keep critical functions running during a disruption.
● A DRP is about technology: restoring systems, applications, and data to agreed targets after an outage or loss.
● A DRP is usually one component of, or a supporting plan to, the wider BCP. Business needs set the recovery targets, and the DRP is designed to meet them.
● Backups alone are not a plan. A backup is an ingredient of a DRP, and a DRP is an ingredient of continuity.
2. BCP and DRP
Aspect
Business continuity plan (BCP)
Disaster recovery plan (DRP)
Purpose
Keep critical business functions operating during and after a disruption
Restore IT systems, applications, and data after an outage or loss
Technology: infrastructure, applications, data, networks, and access
Core question
How do we keep serving customers while things are broken?
How do we get our technology back, and how quickly?
Triggers
Any serious disruption, including loss of staff, premises, suppliers, or systems
Failure or loss of systems or data, from cyber attack, hardware or cloud failure, or site loss
Typical owner
Executive sponsor and business continuity coordinator, with business unit owners
IT leadership, infrastructure and applications teams, with security
Key measures
Critical functions, minimum service levels, maximum tolerable disruption
RTO and RPO for each system, recovery sequence
Typical contents
Continuity strategies, workarounds, alternate working arrangements, supplier plans, communications
System inventory, backup and replication design, recovery procedures, failover and failback
Tested by
Tabletop and scenario exercises involving the business
Restore tests, failover tests, and technical exercises
Time horizon
From the first hours until normal operations resume
From declaration of a disaster until systems are recovered and validated
3. What Goes into Each Plan
A Typical BCP Outline
● Purpose, scope, and governance, including the policy and executive sponsor.
● Summary of the business impact analysis: critical functions, dependencies, and tolerances.
● Activation criteria and decision authority: who can declare an incident and when.
● Continuity strategies for people (cross-training, remote work, backup staff), premises (alternate sites or home working), suppliers (alternates and contractual commitments), and information (vital records).
● Manual or reduced-capability workarounds for critical processes.
● Communications plan for staff, customers, partners, regulators, and media.
● Resource requirements and contact lists.
● Recovery and resumption procedures, including the return to normal.
● Exercise schedule, review cycle, and change log.
A Typical DRP Outline
● Purpose, scope, and the systems covered, with an inventory of applications, data, and owners.
● Recovery objectives (RTO and RPO) for each system, taken from the business impact analysis.
● Dependencies and the recovery sequence, because systems must come back in a workable order.
● Data protection design: backups, replication, immutable or offline copies, and where they are kept.
● Recovery site or cloud region, and how people and systems reach it.
● Step-by-step recovery procedures (runbooks) for each system or scenario.
● Recovery of foundations: network, identity, DNS, and access, without which applications cannot be used.
● Validation steps to confirm data and systems are correct before returning to service.
● Failback to normal operations, testing schedule and results, and change management.
A typical recovery sequence starts with connectivity and identity, then core infrastructure and data stores, then applications and integrations, then user access. Your own sequence should come from your dependency mapping.
4. How the Plans Work Together During an Incident
Phase
What happens
Plan to lead
Prepare
Business impact analysis, written plans, people trained, exercises run
Business continuity management programme
Detect and respond
Protect people and safety, contain the incident, assess impact, decide whether to activate plans
Incident and emergency response, crisis management
Continue
Keep critical functions running with workarounds and alternate arrangements; communicate
BCP
Recover technology
Restore systems and data in priority order and validate them
DRP
Return to normal
Fail back, clear backlogs, reconcile data, and resume standard operations
BCP and DRP together
Learn
Post-incident review, update plans, fix gaps
Business continuity management programme
The hand-over between phases is where plans most often fail. The people running continuity need to know when each system will return, and the people recovering systems need to know which ones the business needs first. Plan that conversation, including who provides updates and how often.
5. The Timing Measures That Tie Them Together
Both plans rest on a small set of timing measures from the business impact analysis. ISO 22301 uses several; these are the ones you will see most often.
Measure
Meaning
Used mainly by
MTPD (maximum tolerable period of disruption)
How long a function can be down before the damage becomes unacceptable; also called maximum tolerable downtime
BCP
MBCO (minimum business continuity objective)
The minimum level of service the business must deliver during a disruption
BCP
RTO (recovery time objective)
How quickly a system or process must be restored
DRP and BCP
WRT (work recovery time)
Time needed after systems return to verify data, clear backlogs, and resume normal work
BCP
RPO (recovery point objective)
The maximum amount of data loss, measured in time, that you can accept
DRP
They connect through a simple rule: the time to restore systems plus the time to get back to normal work must fit inside the maximum tolerable disruption. In other words, RTO plus WRT should not exceed MTPD. If a function can tolerate only eight hours of disruption, a system with a six-hour RTO leaves just two hours to verify and catch up, which may not be enough. Setting these measures together is how the BCP and DRP stay consistent.
6. A Worked Example
The following hypothetical example shows how the plans divide the work. A 120-person professional services firm discovers ransomware on its file servers and email system on a Monday morning, with client deadlines that week.
BCP actions (keep the firm working)
DRP actions (recover the technology)
Executive sponsor declares an incident and convenes the crisis team
IT and security isolate affected systems and preserve evidence
Staff switch to the agreed alternate communication channel and are told what not to open or connect
Recovery team confirms the scope and checks that backups were not affected
Account managers contact clients with the most urgent deadlines and agree workarounds
Identity and network foundations are rebuilt in a clean environment
Critical work continues offline copies and manual processes where possible
Systems are restored in priority order from clean, verified backups
Legal and compliance assess notification duties to clients, insurers, and regulators
Restored data is validated, credentials are reset, and monitoring is increased
Backlog is prioritised once systems return, and the incident is reviewed afterwards
Systems return to service, and the recovery is documented
Sophos' 2024 State of Ransomware report put the mean cost to recover from a ransomware attack, excluding any ransom payment, at US$2.73 million, which is one reason organisations treat both plans as essential. The cost for any one organisation will differ widely.
7. The Related Plans People Confuse Them With
Several other plans sit around the BCP and DRP. NIST SP 800-34 describes a family of them, and in practice you will meet most of the following.
Plan
Focus
How it relates
Incident response plan
Detecting, containing, and eradicating a security or technical incident
Runs first and alongside; may trigger the DRP and the BCP
Crisis management and communications plan
Senior decision-making and messaging during a major event
Directs the response and aligns messages across plans
Emergency response plan
Protecting people: evacuation, first aid, safety wardens
Come before continuity when lives or safety are at risk
Continuity of operations plan (COOP)
Maintaining essential functions, often used in government
Close cousin of the BCP
Cyber incident response plan
Specific procedures for cyber attacks
Feeds the DRP and the crisis plan
Supplier and third-party continuity plans
How critical providers will keep serving you
Inputs to your BCP strategies
8. Common Misconceptions
● 'We back up our data, so we have disaster recovery.' Backups are necessary but not sufficient. You also need recovery procedures, a place to recover to, access and identity, validated restores, and agreed timings.
● 'Business continuity is only for natural disasters.' Cyber-attacks, supplier failures, software faults, and the loss of key people are now more common triggers.
● 'The DRP covers business continuity.' A DRP brings systems back but does not keep customers served, staff working, or suppliers engaged while it does.
● 'The cloud means we do not need a DRP.' Cloud providers secure their platform under the shared responsibility model, but you remain responsible for your data, configuration, identities, and recovery design, and region-level or account-level problems still happen.
● 'We wrote the plan, so we are done.' Plans decay as systems, staff, and suppliers change. They need owners, scheduled tests, and updates.
● 'Only large organisations need this.' Smaller organisations often have the least slack to absorb an outage, so a simple, tested plan is worth more than a thick unread document.
9. Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between a BCP and a DRP?
A business continuity plan keeps critical business functions running during a disruption, covering people, processes, premises, suppliers, and communications. A disaster recovery plan restores IT systems and data after an outage or loss.
Do I need both a BCP and a DRP?
Yes, in most cases. The DRP restores technology, but the business still needs to operate while systems are down and to recover in an order that serves its priorities.
Is disaster recovery part of business continuity?
Usually, yes. Disaster recovery is commonly treated as a component of, or supporting plan to, the broader business continuity programme, with recovery targets set by business needs.
What is included in a business continuity plan?
Scope and governance, a summary of the business impact analysis, activation criteria, continuity strategies for people, premises, suppliers, and information, workarounds, a communications plan, contact lists, recovery procedures, and an exercise and review schedule.
What is included in a disaster recovery plan?
A system and data inventory, recovery objectives for each system, dependencies and recovery sequence, data protection design, recovery site details, step-by-step runbooks, foundation recovery (network, identity, DNS), validation, failback, and testing records.
What is the difference between a DRP and an incident response plan?
An incident response plan covers detecting, containing, and eradicating a security or technical incident. A DRP covers restoring systems and data afterwards. They run in sequence and often overlap.
Are backups the same as a disaster recovery plan?
No. Backups are one ingredient. A disaster recovery plan also needs recovery procedures, a place to recover to, identity and network recovery, validated restores, and agreed timings.
What does MTPD mean?
MTPD is the maximum tolerable period of disruption: how long a function can be unavailable before the damage becomes unacceptable. RTO plus work recovery time should fit within it.
Who owns the BCP and DRP?
An executive sponsor is accountable. A business continuity coordinator runs the programme, business unit owners own their functions, and IT leadership and security own technical recovery.
How often should the plans be tested?
Review them at least twice a year and after major changes, run scenario exercises at least annually, and test restores and failovers regularly, with critical systems tested most often. Some regulations set minimum frequencies, so check yours.
Does the cloud remove the need for a DRP?
No. Under the shared responsibility model, you remain responsible for your data, configuration, identities, and recovery design. The cloud makes some recovery patterns easier, but you still need to plan and test.
Does law require a BCP or DRP?
It depends on your sector and location. Regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, and critical infrastructure often have explicit requirements, and many customer contracts and insurers expect them.
10. Conclusion
The business continuity plan and the disaster recovery plan answer different questions, and an organisation needs answers to both. One keeps the business running, and the other brings the technology back, and they succeed when they share the same targets, owners, and tests. Start with a clear business impact analysis, keep the plans short and usable, protect your backups, and rehearse the handover between them.
Want help turning your plans into real recovery capability?nuwair.com's cloud architecture, Infrastructure as Code, DevSecOps, and managed IT teams can help you set recovery targets, build resilient environments, and run regular restore tests. Talk to our team to scope your continuity and recovery review.
