Defining Disaster Recovery: A Glossary of Terms Here are definitions for some of the commonly used industry words and phrases.

Business Continuity: A system of planning for, recovering and maintaining both the IT and business environments within an organization regardless of the type of interruption. In addition to the IT infrastructure, it covers people, facilities, workplaces, equipment, business processes, and more.

Cold Site: A facility that has been prepared for use as an alternative facility, but does not have equipment installed.

Disaster Recovery: The process of restoring and maintaining the data, equipment, applications and other technical resources on which a business depends.

Emergency Operations Center (EOC): A location from which response teams exercise direction and control in an emergency or disaster.

Hotsite: A disaster recovery facility fully equipped with the equipment, network connections and environmental conditions that are needed for you to restore your data and get your systems up and running.

Information Availability: Uninterrupted access to mission-critical data and systems.

Mission-critical: A computer system or application that is essential to the functioning of your business and its processes.

Redundancy: A system of using multiple sources, devices or connections so that no single point of failure will completely stop the flow of information.

Recovery Time Objective: The time period in which your business must recover from a disruption to its IT systems and can be measured as real-time, minutes, hours, days or longer.

Recovery Point Objective: The actual point in time back to which your systems and data need to be recovered after a disaster (i.e., the amount of data you can afford to lose).

Warm Site:  A facility that has been prepared for use as an alternate facility. Probably has the necessary infrastructure for its intended use, but little or no equipment installed.  Less than a "hot site" but more than a "cold site".

For additional information, the DRI International site at http://www.drj.com/glossary/drjglossary.html provides an expanded glossary of terms.