When it comes to ensuring your business keeps running despite disasters, disruptions, or technical failures, the terminology can often feel overwhelming. To help cut through the jargon, we’ve compiled a straightforward guide to the most common terms in Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR). Whether you’re an IT professional or a business leader, this glossary will ensure everyone is on the same page when discussing resilience strategies.
- Business Continuity Plan (BCP): The plan used by an organisation or business unit to respond to a disaster or disruption of operations. A Business Continuity Plan includes a predetermined set of procedures and documentation that defines the resources, actions, tasks, data, and processing priorities required to manage business continuity and restoration processes in the event of an incident.
- Disaster: An unanticipated event or interruption that impacts an organisation’s critical business functions and/or technology environment.
- Disaster Recovery Plan: The compilation of technological strategies and actions that aim to minimise the impact of business interruptions. Along with speed up the effort to recover and fully resume business processes. A Disaster Recovery Plan generally focuses on technology recovery and restoration.
- Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD): The longest period of time that a business process can be unavailable before it causes significant harm to the organisation. This is typically defined by contractual obligations or industry compliance requirements.
- Recovery Point (RP): A Recovery Point is the point in time when data or a system is saved.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time.
- Recovery Time (RT): The actual amount of time it will take for a service or technology to be recovered
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The acceptable length of time it should take to restore normal operations following an outage or data loss. For example, if your RTO is 2 hours, you need to restore operations within 2 hours to avoid major issues.
- Downtime: Time during a regular working period where a system or compute is unavailable and can’t be used.
- Backup: A process by which data (electronic or paper-based) and programmes are copied in some form so as to be available and used if the original data from which it originated are lost, destroyed or corrupted.
- Business Impact Analysis (BIA): The management level analysis by which an organisation assesses the quantitative (financial) and qualitative (non-financial) impacts, effects and loss that might result if the organisation were to suffer a disaster.
- Incident Response Team (IRT): Is a group of professionals responsible for managing and responding to emergencies, such as cybersecurity threats, natural disasters, or business disruptions.
- Business Continuity Team (BCT): Designated individuals responsible for developing, execution, rehearsals, and maintenance of the business continuity plan.
- Disaster Recovery Plans (DRPs): Detailed instructions on how to respond to unplanned incidents such as natural disasters, power outages, cyber attacks and any other disruptive events.
Protecting your business from downtime
By understanding these terms, you’ll be better equipped to discuss and implement strategies that safeguard your organisation. Business disruptions are inevitable, but with the right knowledge and planning, you can minimise their impact and recover confidently.
In today’s unpredictable environment, organisations must take proactive steps to stay resilient. Our Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services are designed to help organisations prepare for, respond to, and recover from unexpected events, from cyberattacks to natural disasters.
