Disaster Recovery Plan vs Business Continuity vs Cyber Incident

[DavR]

Our Disaster Recovery Plan is due for renewal in the next couple of months, and I'm considering starting from scratch, as we've gone cloud since the last review. I've never been entirely happy with the existing one tbh, but, I've just kept updating it as required thus far.

 

I don't hear the phrase Disaster Recovery bandied around so much these days, Business Continuity seems to be the more up to date approach (I'm aware there are differences), so I wonder, what are other people doing. Do you have just one of the above, or both? Are they school wide or purely IT based? Does anyone have a separate Cyber Incident Plan?

 

Is there anywhere in, for instance, the latest DfE Standards that dictate what the expectation is, in terms of recovery planning?

 

We're a primary school, with an IT staff of one (1), so I want to keep this as simple as possible. We don't use the RPA insurance so aren't bound by their regs, but of course, we do want to be on the right side of best practice.

[Roberto]

Business Continuity is the process of keeping the doors open and the lights on, so to speak, in the face of adversity. Disaster recovery is the process of recovering back to normal operations after said adversity. You kinda need both, but if you think about risk management in terms of probability and impact, it's more likely you'll get hit by issues that cause relatively minor disruption and therefore might need more frequent "business continuity" planning to guard against vs the least likely but more impactful scenario of a plan crashing on top of the school overnight. Clearly they're related, and the common jargon to talk about these days is "BCDR".

 

If anyone's not clear on the difference, then, for example, you get hit by ransomware (God Forbid):

• What you do to try and keep the school running during the immediate event is Business Continuity. This might include how you deliver teaching, how you might literally keep the lights on by paying the bills through an emergency process while the finance system is offline, etc.
  
• What you do to restore your IT services to normal every day running once the immediate crisis is over is Disaster Recovery.
  

Edited December 8, 2023 by Roberto