How does incident recovery differ from business continuity recovery?

• A. Incident recovery focuses on restoring affected assets/systems; business continuity recovery centers on sustaining essential operations.
• B. Business continuity recovery focuses on restoring assets; incident recovery focuses on core operations.
• C. Incident recovery is the same as business continuity recovery.
• D. Incident recovery only concerns financial losses after an incident.

Answer: (A)

The main idea here is the difference between restoring IT and assets after an incident and keeping the business running during a disruption. Incident recovery is about bringing affected assets and systems back to a usable state after an incident—repairing hardware, restoring data, and returning technology to normal operation. Business continuity recovery, on the other hand, is about sustaining essential operations and ensuring that critical functions continue even while the disruption is being managed, which includes priorities, processes, people, facilities, and communications.

This distinction helps: incident recovery focuses on technical restoration, while business continuity looks at keeping the business delivering its critical services, often under alternate arrangements and with defined recovery objectives (like RTOs and RPOs).

For example, after a data center outage, incident recovery would repair the servers and restore databases. Business continuity would ensure core operations—order processing, customer support, and communications—still function, perhaps using backup sites or remote work, so the business remains able to operate.

The other statements either oversimplify by focusing only on assets, claim they are the same, or limit recovery to financial losses, all of which miss the broader scope of keeping essential business activities running.