The two terms get used interchangeably and they answer genuinely different questions. Disaster recovery is a technical capability: can this system be restored, and how quickly. IT service continuity management is broader and organisational: if a major disruption happens, can the business keep functioning, and what does that require beyond restoring servers — alternate work locations, manual fallback processes, communication to customers, and a clear decision on which systems must come back first.
The reason this distinction matters practically is that a technically flawless disaster recovery plan can still leave a business unable to operate. Restoring the payment system perfectly in four hours means nothing if the customer service team has no way to work and no idea what to tell customers during those four hours. ITSCM is the layer that plans for the business, not just the infrastructure.
Building it starts with a business impact analysis that IT alone cannot complete — it requires each department head to state honestly how long their function can survive without a given system, and what the financial or reputational cost of an hour's disruption actually is. IT then designs its recovery priorities against those answers rather than against a technical guess at what seems important.
The plan is only as good as the last time it was tested with people who weren't told the scenario in advance. A DR plan that has only ever been reviewed on paper, or rehearsed by the people who wrote it, reliably has gaps that only surface when someone unfamiliar with the assumptions tries to follow it under real pressure — which is exactly the condition a genuine disruption creates.
