Business Continuity has evolved beyond Information Technology ('IT') to become part and parcel of every corporate environment, touching every business function. The shift from Disaster Recovery Planning ('DRP') to Business Continuity Planning ('BCP') is recognition that Information Technology is just one essential component of the business. To effectively recover from a disaster and resume operations, an organization needs to cover all the three core components - People, Process and Infrastructure.

During the 1970 - 80's, the focus was on DRP, i.e. reactive recovery of IT assets and network operations following a disaster. Little emphasis was placed on rest of the organization. This meant that the non-critical systems and applications would be down for a long time, while the IT personnel or vendor restored or replaced the affected systems and networking capabilities.

Since the mid-1980s, business continuity evolved to reflect the world's growing dependence on IT. Where it was once considered adequate to restore computer operations hours or days after an IT interruption, users now expected key business processes to be accessible on a 24 X 365 basis. In response, IT solution providers developed approaches that focused on prevention and continuity rather than after-the-fact recovery.

By mid-1990s, the focus had widened and the term Continuity of Operations ('COOP') was coined which focused on the entire function that the organization was to carry out.