In TA context, what is the difference between business continuity planning and disaster recovery?

• A. BCP focuses on maintaining operations during disruptions; DR focuses on restoring IT systems after a disruption.
• B. BCP focuses on IT restoration, while DR focuses on maintaining operations.
• C. They are the same concept.
• D. TA is not involved in either BCP or DR.

Answer: (A)

Business continuity planning keeps essential operations going during disruptions, covering people, facilities, processes, supply chains, and communications so the organization can continue functioning. Disaster recovery, by contrast, is about restoring IT systems after a disruption—bringing back servers, networks, databases, and applications so those critical services can be supported again. In practice, disaster recovery is a part of the broader continuity plan; you can’t sustain business operations without having IT systems back online, but the overall plan looks beyond technology to keep the business moving. For example, if a data center goes down, the continuity plan might route work to an alternate location and use manual processes, while the disaster recovery plan details how to recover the IT environment and data to restore normal operations. The other options miss this distinction or treat them as the same or unrelated—so the correct view is that continuity focuses on staying operational, while disaster recovery focuses on restoring IT after the disruption.