Business continuity vs disaster recovery

The two terms get used interchangeably, but they describe different, related things.

Business continuity (BC)

Keeping the whole organisation functioning, or getting it functioning again quickly, during and after a disruption. That includes people, processes, suppliers, facilities, and communications, not just IT.

Disaster recovery (DR)

The specific part of that plan focused on restoring IT systems, applications, and data after an incident. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity, an important one, but only one piece of the wider picture.

An organisation can have excellent IT disaster recovery and still fail during a real disruption if nobody knows who's in charge, how to communicate with customers, or where to work from if the office is unusable.