I just returned from Asia where I was fortunate to have a number of conversations with IT professionals from Seoul and Kuala Lumpur. One thing I observed, which I obviously think is worth repeating, is the confusion surrounding Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. The confusion is that many people consider them to be one and the same. They are not.

In simple terms Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is working out how to stay in business following a disaster. Disaster Recovery (DR) is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or to the continuation of technology infrastructure operations critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster Recovery is an integral part of any BCP and the part that is overlooked on a regular basis. In sum, these disciplines go hand in hand and when they do not, companies can suffer tremendous losses.

Here is a recent example of a failed BC/DR Strategy:

First, I want to clarify something: disaster recovery (DR) can mean many things. From my perspective, I couldn’t care less how a storage vendor provides remote copy services – when my critical IT business application goes down, I lose money. This loss, depending on the annual frequency of outages, can range from $10,000 to many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year! This application or service protection is what FalconStor is all about. Delivering this type of solution goes beyond the mere storage and remote replication solutions actively promoted by the major SAN vendors. However, application availability, or resilience, has been around for some time in the form of server clusters.

Comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery and (BCDR) processes and the testing of these systems are critical for all companies. Often business continuity is defined as handling the company’s ability to operate, while disaster recovery (DR) stands for the ability to restore full operations. However, for IT, implementing BCDR plans is overwhelming and complex. The sheer amount of IT infrastructure components that are involved in the process makes it almost impossible to manage. For instance, in a recent survey by TechTarget, only 41 percent of IT executives said they successfully recovered all their applications during a test of their BCDR solution and 54 percent reported testing their BCDR plan twice a year or more. These numbers are disturbingly low, as recovery time is everything and effective testing improves your recovery time.

I sat down today to write part two of my CIO Zone article about disaster recovery (DR) automation that addresses the cost factors of DR deployments. But after being glued to the news for the past few days and weeks following the nature-caused disaster in Japan and the human-caused disaster in Libya, I’m humbled by the human cost of these disasters and saddened by the tragic turn taken by these two very different catastrophes.