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When IT Goes Dark: What Are Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

Innovate
Jan 15, 2026 10:00:00 AM
When IT Goes Dark: What Are Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?
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IT outages are no longer an inconvenience that stays neatly inside the IT department. In a cloud-first world, one provider failure can ripple across services, supply chains, and “trusted” tools you did not even realise were hosted on the same underlying platforms. The result is disruption customers notice, revenue you cannot recover, and reputational damage that lingers far longer than the technical fix.

That’s why business continuity and disaster recovery need to be owned beyond the CIO’s team. In this article, we clarify what business continuity truly means (keeping your most important promises running, even imperfectly), what disaster recovery covers (restoring systems and data after serious disruption), and why confusing the two creates dangerous blind spots. We also explain how to connect priorities like customer service, payments, and compliance to realistic recovery capabilities, so you do not end up with a DR plan that looks great on paper but fails the business when it matters.

With cloud outages and cyberattacks increasing, disaster recovery is now a must. 
 

A patch rollout or cloud wobble can turn an IT hiccup into a customer-facing crisis. This article explains how business continuity and disaster recovery fit together and why getting the order right matters.

IT Outages Are Now Business Outages

Last year, in just a few weeks, we saw outages at Cloudflare, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. That’s usually when you discover your trusted provider is quietly running on one of those platforms too.

What's worrying: It only takes one provider outage to cause disruption on a scale that customers notice and remember.

Yes, the root cause is often technical. But the impact is not. An outage goes far beyond an IT issue, affecting revenue, operations and reputation. That makes it a topic for the whole leadership team, not just the CIO and a few engineers.

Whether you’re responsible for IT or sit on the board, you need to understand business continuity and disaster recovery together. Because something as simple as a patch deployment gone wrong can have the same business impact as a cyberattack.

If you want a real-world example why business continuity and disaster recovery are important, watch our Microsoft 365 cybersecurity webinar in which Paul Abbott, former director at Knights of Old, talks through the aftermath of a ransomware attack and the consequences for their business.

What’s Business Continuity?

In plain terms, business continuity is your organisation’s ability to keep working when something goes wrong. Not perfectly. Not exactly as on a normal day. But well enough that:

  • Customers can still place orders
  • Payments can still be processed
  • Clinicians can still access patient records
  • Regulators do not start circling

What's important for you to understand is: Business continuity isn’t about keeping servers running but rather about keeping promises.

Technology is usually part of the solution, but it’s not the point. The point is whether the services that matter to your customers, staff and stakeholders can continue.

What’s Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) is narrower. It’s about how you get your IT services and data back after a serious disruption.

That includes things like:

  • Restoring systems from backups
  • Failing over to a secondary data centre or cloud region
  • Rebuilding key infrastructure such as identity, networking and storage

You can’t have credible business continuity without solid disaster recovery. If you can’t restore systems or data in a realistic timeframe, there’s a hard limit on how long you can keep operating.

But disaster recovery on its own isn’t enough to keep the business functioning. You can technically recover systems and still have staff confused, customers in the dark and regulators unimpressed.

How Do Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Differ?

Disaster recovery is a part of business continuity, not a separate universe. A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) should include disaster recovery as one of its core components. The four p’s of BCP are

  1. People
  2. Processes
  3. Premises
  4. Providers/Partners (Products/Plant)

Treating BCP and DR as the same thing creates blind spots:

  • A DR plan might restore a database, but say nothing about how the contact centre handles calls while systems are down
  • A BCP might assume IT will “be back in four hours”, without any evidence that this is realistic

The hierarchy should be:

  1. Business continuity sets out which services must be protected, in what order, and how much downtime and data loss is acceptable.
  2. Disaster recovery shows how IT will be designed, run and tested to meet those expectations.

If you get the order wrong, you’ll end up with technically impressive DR plans that don’t actually protect the business.

Where To Go Next

This article has focused on definitions and relationships. If you’re still at the “what is BC/DR?” stage, that is fine. The next step is to understand:

  • Why IT outages are inevitable in a cloud-first world
  • The key metrics every leader should know: RTO, RPO and criticality

We will tackle those in the next article in this series.
Backup & Recovery

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