What is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR)?
With technology representing an increasingly critical role in Stanford meeting its research, teaching, learning, and health care goals, University IT (UIT) is a pivotal strategic and service delivery partner for the entire Stanford community. UIT helps design the applications and systems Stanford depends upon, even if an event impacts a service.
Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) planning is a practice that prepares us to minimize the effects of significant service-impacting events.
BC/DR is divided into two different phases/components:
- Business Continuity (BC): BC focuses on the business operations side of BC/DR. It involves designing and creating policies and procedures that ensure that essential business functions and processes are available during and after a disaster. BC can include the replacement of staff, service availability issues, business impact analysis, and change management.
- Disaster Recovery (DR): DR is primarily focused on the IT side of BC/DR. It defines how an organization’s IT department will recover from a natural or manmade disaster. The processes within this phase can include server and network restoration, copying backup data, and provisioning backup systems.
Why do I need to plan for BC/DR?
BC/DR helps Stanford:
- Protect our client’s data
- Limit downtime and speed up service recovery and availability
- Protect our reputation
How do I establish BC/DR processes?
In UIT, the BC/DR team identifies services for which they provide assistance in developing BC/DR plans, and then tests and validates these plans.
| I want to: | Here’s how: | When: | Who is responsible? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Develop a BC/DR plan for an on-premise service | Download Part A and Part B (on-premise) Disaster Recovery templates | Download and complete when you are contacted by a member of the BC/DR team | Service Owner Service Manager |
| Develop a BC/DR plan for a cloud service | Download Part A and Part B (cloud service) Disaster Recovery templates | Download and complete when you are contacted by a member of the BC/DR team | Service Owner Service Manager |
Learn more about Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
- IT Resilience Toolkit
- For additional resources, visit the BC/DR Team Drive
- Disaster Recovery templates:
- Part A: Applicable to all plans
- Part B: for an on-premise hosted service
- Part B: for a cloud service
