Business Continuity is defined as something implemented before a disaster; Business Continuity refers to those daily activities performed to maintain consistency, service, and recoverability. Business Continuity is the activity performed by an organization to ensure that critical business functions will be available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions. These activities include many daily chores such as project management, system backups, change control, and help desk.

Business continuity is very often confused with disaster recovery but they are very different entities. Disaster recovery is only a small subset of full blown business continuity. The underpinning of Business Continuity is the guidelines, policies, procedures, and standards implemented by an business. All aspects of system support, design, implementation, and maintenance must be based on this foundation in order to have any hope of achieving Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, or in some cases, system support

The definition Business Continuity explains a mentality or methodology of conducting day-to-day business operations, as opposed to Business Continuity Planning which is an activity to determine what that exact methodology should be. The Business Continuity Plan may be thought of as the manifestation of a methodology or set of steps that everyone in an organization is required to follow on a daily basis to maintain normal operations.
 

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