Emergency Response (ERP), Disaster Recovery (DRP) and Business Continuity (BCP) are not the same thing.

THERE! I said it... Before you chase me with pitchforks and torches, let put this into a scenario. Before we get into the scenario, we can't stress how important it is you understand the subtle differences. It's so important, we have separate BCP vs DRP and BCP vs ERP posts to further drive home the point. On to the scenario...!

The scenario

You are sitting in your office building and the fire alarm goes off. Following health and safety procedures, you head outside and smell smoke. Looking up, you see flames coming from the top two floors of the building. The fire department arrives and prepares to put the fire out. Your colleagues are moved away from the building and people with injuries are treated. You are left to wonder when, if ever, you’ll be able to return to work.

Within three days, your IT department has set you up with a new laptop so that you can work remotely. You and your colleagues work together online with Zoom or Microsoft Teams and other online solutions. Eventually, the building damages are repaired and you get a notice that everyone can return to work as before the fire.

Emergency Response

Emergency Response is focused on the safety and protection of life, assets, and the environment. It includes emergency preparedness, training and exercising, evacuation plans, crisis response and working with first responders.

Ok... where does this fit in the scenario we're talking about? Pretty much everything up to the point where everyone is outside, accounted for and the injured are being attended to.

NOTE: While your BCP will likely include some tasks and evacuation details for when an incident occurs, Emergency Response has the final say over Business Continuity Planning how everyone will evacuate, etc. While having the final say, it doesn't mean the two programs don't work in tandem. Once the initial crisis concerns are dealt with, the longer-term Business Continuity steps are followed.

Disaster Recovery

Don't worry, we didn't forget about Disaster Recovery! It's focus is going to be on the IT side of the business. As a result, a Disaster Recovery risk assessment and plan focuses on the impacts to IT, full stop. What actions are required to recover or restore systems so employees to perform work tasks.

Thinking of our fire scenario above, that includes: Purchasing, imaging and distributing laptops to employees, taking recovery steps to restore/recover/replace damaged servers and ensuring that remote access is available for those working remotely.

Business Continuity

Business Continuity looks to continue all business-critical operations while safeguarding the business reputation. As a result, your Business Continuity Plan (BCP) will encompass who are your critical customers, a roadmap to determine what critical projects are due and how to do things like process payroll or finances when everyone is working from somewhere that isn't the office.

From the fire scenario above, Business Continuity would outline: The decision process by Senior Management to continue work from home, communication of that decision to employees, decision to return to the office building and so forth.

In Conclusion - Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery vs Emergency Response

The fact that you are able to work, walk and survived the fire is thanks to Emergency Response. Your collaboration online while working from home is the Business Continuity strategy. With the actual setup of that infrastructure is a Disaster Recovery strategy.

As you can see, there is a distinct (and subtle) difference between Emergency Response, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. They each have their own focus and when they work together seamlessly, the response to an incident is smooth, efficient, and effective.

Success stems from putting incidents in context and ensuring the response is appropriate.

We take a deeper dive into the difference between Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) in this blog post. We also compare Emergency Response and Business Continuity in this post.