How does disaster recovery help business continuity?

Disaster recovery is a component of the overall business continuity strategy of an organization. Business continuity is the ability of the organization and all the supporting applications to run critical business functions at all times, including during emergency events.

To achieve business continuity, you must implement various types of resilience mechanisms. Resilience is the ability of an application to recover from an outage, either automatically or with human intervention.

Disaster recovery (sometimes called business continuity/disaster recovery, BC/DR, or DR) is an important part of your resilience strategy and determines how you respond when a disaster strikes. This response varies between applications and should be based on your organization's business objectives for each application. These objectives should specify (among other things) the strategy for minimizing loss of data and reducing downtime when your applications are not available for use. This approach helps your organization maintain operations as part of business continuity planning (BCP).