What is the difference between BCP and DRP? Business continuity plan and recovery from the accident

If you have attended ISO training classes on information security, or have information in the field of information technology management or ITIL, or you are in charge of information technology in a company or organization, be sure to use words like DRP, which stands for Disaster Recovery Plan. And you came across BCP, which stands for Business Continuity Plan. But what is the main difference between these two words? Today we want to talk in the Iranian Information Technology Association about the difference between BCP and DRP and when they are used?

Before we get into the differences and similarities between the two words, you should know that when the people in charge are confronted with the two words, they want to come up with a plan to deal with threats, attacks, problems, and anything that might trade and The organization disrupts them so that they can return to regular work after a destructive event, and this is the common point between BCP and DRP. The two concepts are very similar in many ways, but you need to understand precisely the difference between them as a responsible person.

What is BCP or Business Continuity Plan?

The Business Continuity Plan (BCP), which stands for Business Continuity Plan or Business Continuity Plan, is a set of processes and guidelines implemented by an organization to later or when a Disaster or continue to work open their daily activities. By implementing a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), organizations seek to protect their critical services so that they can return them to orbit immediately after a disaster and business and business. Continue your work.

This type of design and planning allows the organization to quickly retrieve services and bring them to their full operational level in the fastest time and with the highest possible quality. BCP usually covers all sensitive organizational business processes and all-important business operations. BCP is a macro plan and is generally implemented at the macro level; when you want to understand the concept of Business Continuity Plan properly, you should ask yourself this question:

If our office or organization’s whole building is destroyed, how can we get our business back to normal?

What is DRP or Disaster Recovery Plan?

Disaster Recovery Plan or DRP means disaster recovery plan (accident, horrible event, … D:) and in fact, we can look at DRP as a subset of the BCP master plan. To have and complete a comprehensive business continuity plan in an organization, we need to design and implement a set of DRPs. Unlike BCPs, which look at all issues on a larger scale, DRPs take a more detailed look at problems. DRPs are usually designed and developed as small technical plans for specific groups in an organization, and sometimes for each organizational activity. A separate disaster recovery plan is created separately.

One of the most well-known accident or disaster recovery plans (DRPs), commonly known to everyone in DRP, is IT DRP. But we must not forget that we must have separate DRPs in all areas to create a true BCP by integrating all these DRPs eventually. A simple test to see if there is a DRP in our IT field right now is to ask ourselves this question:

If the organization’s office automation service is lost right now, how should we restore it and return it to the operating environment?

In an accident recovery plan designed for IT services, or in more technical terms, IT DRPs, the priority is to activate users’ services and technologies and provide these services as soon as possible. After starting these services, activating other services for other parts of the organization will be a priority for users. Note that if the Iranian Information Technology Association’s data center has a problem, the focus is to raise and activate the website service. After the users were able to use the service again, it is time to fix the problems in the data center and caused the problem.

One of the misconceptions about IT DRP is that most of our IT executives ask themselves this question and convince themselves by answering it: We in the collection We have a plan to recover from an IT accident, so everything is calm, and how happy I am … (Exactly) But this is not the case, in addition to a good DRP, you must also implement a good BCP in the set. To see a different incident recovery plan for critical and essential personnel of the organization, key and business processes of the organization, recovery of vital information, etc.

Therefore, to better understand the difference between DRP and BCP, it is enough to now make DRP one of BCP subsets. Always to be a good DRP for each case.