1. 1. What Is the Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?
   2. The Gap Most Firms Don’t See: Why “We Have Backups” Isn’t a Plan
   3. What This Looks Like in Recruitment and Professional Services
   4. What an Actual Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan Includes
   5. Where Microsoft 365 Helps, and Where It Stops Short
   6. How Often Should a Business Continuity Plan Be Reviewed?
   7. Getting an Honest Picture of Where You Stand
   8. FAQs: Data Backup and Recovery Services

Ask most business owners if they have a business continuity and disaster recovery plan, and they’ll say yes. Ask what’s actually in it, and the answer is usually the same thing: “we back everything up to the cloud.” That’s a good start. It is not a plan.

The difference matters more than it used to. Recruitment agencies, accountancy firms, HR consultancies and business consultants now run almost entirely on digital systems, from candidate databases and client ledgers to email and shared documents. When those systems go down, the business doesn’t just slow down. It stops.

Business continuity is about keeping the business running while something is wrong. It covers people, communication, and how staff keep serving clients even if the office, the network, or a key system is unavailable.

Disaster recovery is about getting the technology back. It covers restoring servers, applications, cloud environments and data after something has gone wrong, with a clear target for how fast and how completely.

You need both, and they need to work together. A firm that can restore its servers in six hours but has no plan for how staff communicate with clients in the meantime hasn’t solved the problem. Neither has a firm with a slick internal communications plan and no way to actually get its systems back online.

Having backups tells you your data exists somewhere. It doesn’t tell you how quickly you can get it back, who’s responsible for making that happen, or whether the process has ever actually been tested under pressure.

That gap became painfully clear in the collapse of KNP Logistics, a 158 year old UK haulage firm that went into administration in 2023 after a single guessed employee password let the Akira ransomware gang into its network. The attackers didn’t just encrypt the company’s live systems. They also destroyed its backups and disaster recovery infrastructure, leaving nothing to restore from. With a ransom demand estimated at £5 million and no viable way to recover, the firm ceased trading and around 700 people lost their jobs (Weightmans).

That’s an extreme case, but the underlying lesson applies to businesses of every size. A backup sitting in the same environment as your live systems is often exposed to exactly the same attack. If it isn’t tested, isn’t isolated, and isn’t part of a documented plan, it may not be there when you need it most.

The scenarios don’t need to be dramatic to be damaging. An accountancy practice locked out of client tax records during the January filing rush faces a very different kind of pressure than a firm that loses access in a quiet month. A recruitment agency shut out of its applicant tracking system during an active placement can lose candidates and client trust within days, not weeks. A consultancy that loses shared project files right before a client deadline has no time to improvise a fix.

None of these require a headline grabbing cyberattack. Ransomware, accidental deletion, a hardware fault, or a misconfigured system change can all trigger the same outcome: staff who want to work, but can’t.

A proper BCDR plan answers four questions in advance, not during a crisis. How fast do systems need to come back (your recovery time objective, or RTO)? How much data loss can the business tolerate (your recovery point objective, or RPO)? Who is responsible for what during an incident? And has any of this actually been tested, rather than just documented?

For Commercial and Operations Leaders

This is increasingly a client relationship issue as much as a technical one. Procurement teams, auditors and cyber insurers are asking firms to evidence their continuity plans before they’ll sign contracts or renew cover. According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average UK data breach now costs £3.29 million, and firms without tested response processes recover markedly slower than those with one in place (IBM). For most professional services firms, the real cost of an incident isn’t the ransom. It’s the client relationships damaged while the business scrambles to catch up.

For IT Decision Makers

The detail matters here. Backups need to be tested on a defined schedule, not left to run silently in the background. They should be immutable or isolated from the primary environment, since attackers increasingly target backup systems directly, as the KNP case shows. Datto’s State of BCDR Report 2025 found that 84% of MSPs report clients with a proper BCDR solution in place fully recovered from a ransomware attack within 24 hours, compared to those relying on backups alone. (Datto). Configured is not the same as tested, and untested is not the same as ready.

Microsoft 365 gives you a strong starting point. Built in version history, retention policies and geographic redundancy across Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive genuinely reduce risk. But Microsoft’s shared responsibility model means the platform protects its own infrastructure, not your specific configuration, your retention settings, or your recovery from accidental deletion or a targeted attack. Most firms we speak to have never checked where that line actually sits, or assumed Microsoft 365 covers ground it doesn’t. That’s a gap worth closing before it’s tested by an incident rather than a conversation. You can see how we approach data backup and disaster recovery for a sense of what a properly configured setup looks like in practice.

At least once a year, and again whenever something significant changes, whether that’s new systems, new premises, a change in headcount, or a shift in regulatory requirements. A plan written two years ago for a team half the size, using software you no longer run, isn’t protecting the business you have today.

Most firms don’t know whether their current setup would actually hold up until something goes wrong, and by then it’s too late to find out gently. If you’re not sure whether what you have is a backup or a genuine continuity plan, that’s worth a conversation before it’s tested by circumstance. We’ve also written about the most common data backup and recovery mistakes we see firms make, which is a useful place to start if you want to check your own setup against them.