Recovery and Continuity of Operations
Recovery is long and layered
Recovery proceeds in overlapping phases: short-term (safety, shelter, damage assessment), intermediate (restoring services, temporary housing, debris removal), and long-term (rebuilding, economic revitalization, mitigation). National recovery frameworks organize around community planning and capacity building, economic recovery, health and social services, housing, infrastructure systems, and natural and cultural resources. Recovery is where mitigation opportunities are best captured, so "rebuild better" provisions and hazard mitigation planning must be considered early.
Continuity keeps essential functions alive
Continuity planning identifies essential functions and their dependencies, then provides orders of succession, delegations of authority, alternate and virtual facilities, vital records protection, communications, human capital provisions, devolution to a remote team, and reconstitution. The BIA sets recovery time objectives and maximum tolerable downtime for each function.
Continuity versus recovery
Continuity is what the organization does during a disruption to keep essential functions running. Recovery is the longer restoration of the community and the organization afterward. Exam items swap these freely.
Traps
Claiming recovery ends when the emergency declaration closes; setting a recovery time objective longer than the maximum tolerable downtime; planning alternate sites without testing them; forgetting vital records and delegations of authority.
Worked example: A payment function has a maximum tolerable downtime of 48 hours. The team drafts a recovery time objective of 72 hours; that is invalid, because the objective exceeds the tolerable outage. The plan must instead shorten restoration to 24 hours or reduce the tolerable downtime, keeping a margin for uncertainty.