This document discusses the differences between disaster recovery and business continuity. Disaster recovery aims to recover data after a downtime disaster without data loss, while business continuity allows businesses to continue operating seamlessly during interruptions. Combining the two approaches allows businesses to recover from viruses or corruption using prior backups. The document also outlines various sources of planned and unplanned downtime, costs of downtime, and steps to determine optimal system availability.

1. Disaster Recovery
vs. Business Continuity
And The Cost of Downtime

2. Are they the same?
Disaster Recovery and Business
Continuity are stemmed from the same
general idea: in the event of a disaster, keep
the business running as quickly and as
seamlessly as possible.
However, Disaster Recovery is a reactive
solution and Business Continuity is a
proactive solution for businesses.

3. Goal of
Disaster Recovery
To ensure that the data is recovered in the
event of a downtime disaster – without the
loss of that critical data.

4. Goal of
Business Continuity
To allow businesses to continue running
without interruptions or to operate in real-
time and pick up a falling component
seamlessly so a business experiences no
downtime in the first place.

5. Combining the two…
…actually allows a business to go back to a
prior backup made by the Disaster Recovery
replication site and recover from that virus or
corruption at a time before the invasion
occurred.

6. Key Terms
Disaster Recovery
– The ability to handle site failure with minimal
disruption to the business
Continuous Operations (CO)
– The ability to perform routine application and
server maintenance and backups with
minimal disruption to the supported business
function – focused on eliminating downtime
associated with planned events

7. Key Terms
Continuous Availability (CA)
– The continuous availability of critical business
functions - focused on eliminated planned and
unplanned downtime as well as server, site and
enterprise protection
High Availability (HA)
– The ability to handle application failures with
minimal disruptions to the business - focused on
continuous operations and recovery of server
failure

8. Key Terms
Business Continuity
– Focused not only on eliminating the risks of
downtime to your IT assets, it includes the
people and process to handle an unplanned
event that affects the entire business or a
region in which the business operates. It
includes IT functions along with pre-arranged
processes for alerting employees and
customers to a disaster, and the preparation
and testing of disaster preparedness plans.

9. Sources of Unplanned Downtime
Natural Disasters
• Wildfires
• Floods & Flash Floods
• Hurricanes
• Tornadoes
• Thunderstorms & Lightning
• Snow, Ice & Winter Storms
• Tsunamis & Other Tidal Action
• Dam Breaks
• Volcanoes
• Earthquakes
Man-Made Disasters
• Home & Building Fires
• Tripping Over the Power Cord
• Hazardous Material Accidents
• Spilling Coffee or Water on
Critical Piece of Hardware
• Terrorism
• Aviation Accidents
• Ship/Maritime Accidents
• Train/Railroad Accidents
• Riots/Civil Unrest
• Bridge Collapses
• Nuclear/Radiological Accidents

10. Downtime & Its Costs
Unplanned downtime: Unpredictable events that cause an
outage; usually related to power, natural disaster or human
error. Unplanned downtime typically represents less than 5
percent of all downtime.
Planned downtime: Planned downtime occurs when you
purposely bring systems, databases, applications or
networks down for maintenance or backup activities,
including daily/weekly saves, batch jobs, database
reorganizations, application and system upgrades, system
maintenance, performance tuning and other activities.

11. Assessing the
Financial Impact of Downtime
Determining the financial cost of downtime can vary with
the severity of the data or application that experienced the
downtime, the time of day, the number of users affected,
and more.
Calculating the costs can be difficult and many of the direct
and indirect costs are likely not immediately apparent.

12. Tangible/Direct Costs
• Lost transaction
revenue
• Lost wages
• Lost inventory
• Remedial labor costs
• Marketing costs
• Bank fees
• Legal penalties
Intangible/Indirect Costs
• Lost business
opportunities
• Loss of employee
and/or employee moral
• Decrease in stock value
• Loss of
customer/partner
goodwill
• Brand damage
• Driving business to
competitor
• Bad publicity/press
Potential Costs

13. What to Consider

14. 5 Steps to Determine
Optimum Availability
• Determine the RTO (Recovery Time Objective)
and RPO (Recovery Point Objective)
• Determine which applications and data are the
most critical and how much downtime would be
acceptable for each
• Assess the ability of your staff to conduct
emergency-scenario operations
• Determine how you will assure the viability and
reliability of the backup data and applications to
ensure that the backup version will be up to
standards
• Prepare a budget

15. Summary
of companies experienced one or more
periods of downtime in the past 12
months.
of SMBs do not have a DR plan in place.
are in areas where they are prone to
natural disasters.
86%
50%
65%
These issues can be avoided by having a Disaster
Recovery and Business Continuity plan in place.
Take advantage of scalability, reliability, recovery,
and peace of mind!

16. For More Information
Contact Us Today
RapidScale, Inc.
100 Pacifica Ste 100
Irvine, CA 92611
(949) 236-7007
Sales: (866) 371-1355
Support: (866) 686-0328
www.rapidscale.net