Comparing enterprise resilience and disaster recovery

What is enterprise resilience and how does it relate to DR?

When faced with the unthinkable, such as the recent Hurricane Sandy, flooding in the U.S. West Coast and wildfires in the western U.S., business continuity and disaster recovery plans can help an enterprise resume business operations. In short, they can help ensure the resilience an organization needs to stay operational, regardless of internal and external threats to its survival.

Typically, business continuity plans describe how an enterprise can recover and resume business operations following a disruptive incident. By contrast, disaster recovery plans describe the steps to take to recover and restore normal operations to IT infrastructure elements, such as networks, servers, data centers, operating systems, applications and data.

Both kinds of plans are key components in a resilient enterprise and are typically implemented using a business continuity management system.