BC/DR: What It Means for Security Reviews

If you’ve ever filled out a security questionnaire, you know the feeling. You’re halfway through answering question 127 of 485, and suddenly a section titled “BC/DR” appears. Your team exchanges nervous glances in the chat. What exactly is BC/DR? How do you answer these questions without sounding like you’re making it up? And why do security reviewers care so much about your disaster recovery plans anyway?

You’re not alone in wondering. BC/DR is one of the most commonly requested sections in security questionnaires, right up there with encryption, access controls, and vulnerability management. Yet many teams struggle to articulate their BC/DR posture clearly and convincingly. The good news is that understanding BC/DR and building strong responses is entirely within your reach, and this article will show you how.

Let’s start with the basics and work our way to practical strategies for answering BC/DR questions like a pro.

What Does BC/DR Mean?

BC/DR stands for two related but distinct concepts: business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR). Understanding the difference between them is the first step to answering security questionnaire questions confidently.

Business continuity refers to your organization’s ability to maintain critical business functions during and after a disruptive event. Think of a hurricane, a cyberattack, a data center failure, or a key vendor going offline. When a disruption strikes, BC is about ensuring that the core operations that matter most to your customers keep running. It’s not about returning everything to normal immediately. It’s about keeping the lights on where it counts.

Disaster recovery is more focused on the technical side. DR is your plan for recovering IT systems, data, and infrastructure after a disaster has occurred. If your database goes down, your disaster recovery plan explains how you’ll restore it. If your website becomes unavailable, your DR procedures outline the steps to get it back online. DR is tactical and technology-centered, while BC is broader and business-focused.

Think of it this way: business continuity asks “how do we keep serving customers?” Disaster recovery asks “how do we restore our systems?” They work together. You need solid disaster recovery capabilities to actually execute your business continuity plan. Learn more in our glossary about these and other security concepts that appear frequently in questionnaires.

Why BC/DR Matters in Security Reviews

When a potential customer is evaluating whether to work with you, they’re not just asking about your firewalls or your encryption protocols. They’re asking themselves a fundamental question: if something goes wrong, will you be able to keep serving me? That’s where BC/DR comes in.

Security reviewers care about BC/DR because it directly impacts their business. If your service goes down for a week, their operations suffer. If your disaster recovery is weak and recovery takes months, they face serious financial and operational consequences. Your BC/DR posture tells them whether you’ve thought through the worst-case scenarios and planned accordingly.

From a security perspective, BC/DR also reveals how seriously you take resilience and operational maturity. A well-designed BC/DR program shows that you’ve identified your critical systems, understand your data flows, and have tested your recovery capabilities. It signals that you’re not just reacting to problems—you’re planning ahead and staying operational no matter what.

Larger enterprises and regulated industries are especially rigorous about BC/DR. Healthcare providers need to ensure patient care continuity. Financial institutions must maintain operations during market crises. Government contractors face strict requirements around system availability. If you’re selling to any of these sectors, a weak BC/DR story will lose you the deal.

Common BC/DR Questions in Security Questionnaires

So what does a typical BC/DR section look like in a security questionnaire? Security questionnaires often contain 50 to 500 or more questions, and BC/DR usually gets its own dedicated section with anywhere from 5 to 20 questions depending on the rigor of the assessment.

Here are the types of questions you’ll commonly see. First, there’s the RTO question. RTO stands for Recovery Time Objective, which is the maximum amount of time you can afford to be down before your business suffers unacceptable damage. A buyer might ask: “What is your RTO for critical systems?” Your answer needs to be specific. “Less than an hour” is better than “we try to recover quickly.” Next comes RPO, or Recovery Point Objective. This is about data loss tolerance. If your systems go down, how much recent data can you afford to lose? A buyer might ask: “What is your RPO for customer data?” If you can only recover from backups taken daily, your RPO is one day. If you backup every hour, your RPO is one hour.

You’ll also see questions about backup and redundancy. “Do you maintain backup copies of critical data in a geographically separate location?” This is asking whether you have geographic diversity. If your primary data center is in California and your backup is in the next building over, a major earthquake could take both down. Strong BC/DR includes offsite backups in a different region or cloud availability zone.

Failover and recovery procedures are another common question category. “Do you conduct regular testing of your disaster recovery procedures?” This matters enormously. A BC/DR plan that’s never been tested is largely theoretical. Security reviewers want to see evidence that you’ve actually run your recovery playbooks, that your team knows how to execute them, and that they actually work in practice.

You may also see questions about roles and responsibilities. “Who is responsible for activating your BC/DR plan?” Who decides when you’re in disaster recovery mode versus normal operations? Do you have a designated incident commander? These questions verify that accountability is clear and that execution won’t devolve into chaos.

Some questionnaires get into specifics about dependencies. “What vendors or third parties are critical to your service delivery, and what are their BC/DR capabilities?” This matters because if your payment processor can’t recover after a disaster, neither can you, regardless of how good your own BC/DR is. You need to understand your supply chain and how vulnerable it is.

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