A Glossary for Disaster Recovery Terms

These are many of the most common terms and acronyms used in the Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity field.

Business Continuity (BC):  Includes planning to ensure the continuity of business critical functions in the event of a major unplanned service failure or disaster--including key aspects such as personnel, facilities, crisis communication, project management and change control. A BC strategy includes a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) for IT related infrastructure recovery.
 
 
Disaster Recovery (DR):  Part of a larger Business Continuity plan that includes processes and solutions to restore business critical applications, data, hardware, communications (such as networking) and other IT infrastructure. Disaster Recovery can also include measures to protect against other unplanned events such as the failure of an individualserver or shorter service interruptions.
 
 
High Availability (HA):  A system or component that is continuously operational for a desirably long length of time.
 
 
Hotsite:  A Disaster Recovery facility fully equipped with the equipment, network connections and environmental conditions necessary for restoring your data and getting your systems up and running instantly. (unlike coldsites and warmsites, which are not ready to go in an instant)
 
 
Mission-Critical:  Systems or applications that are essential to the functioning of your business and its processes.
 
 
Recovery Point Objective (RPO):  The Recovery Point Objective defines the maximum amount of time permitted between corporate resource backups. If a company's RPO is two hours, all data vital to operations must be backed up every two hours. With a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of two hours, all resources can then be restored to a point in time two hours or less before the failure or disaster.
 
 
Recovery Time Objective (RTO):  The maximum tolerable length of time that a computer, system, network or application can be down after a failure or disaster occurs.
 
 
Redundancy:  Systematically using multiple sources, devices or connections to eliminate single points of failure that could completely stop the flow of information.