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What is a business continuity plan (bcp), and how does it work.

business continuity and disaster recovery plan definition

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What Is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)? 

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a system of prevention and recovery from potential threats to a company. The plan ensures that personnel and assets are protected and are able to function quickly in the event of a disaster.

Key Takeaways

  • Business continuity plans (BCPs) are prevention and recovery systems for potential threats, such as natural disasters or cyber-attacks.
  • BCP is designed to protect personnel and assets and make sure they can function quickly when disaster strikes.
  • BCPs should be tested to ensure there are no weaknesses, which can be identified and corrected.

Understanding Business Continuity Plans (BCPs)

BCP involves defining any and all risks that can affect the company's operations, making it an important part of the organization's risk management strategy. Risks may include natural disasters—fire, flood, or weather-related events—and cyber-attacks . Once the risks are identified, the plan should also include:

  • Determining how those risks will affect operations
  • Implementing safeguards and procedures to mitigate the risks
  • Testing procedures to ensure they work
  • Reviewing the process to make sure that it is up to date

BCPs are an important part of any business. Threats and disruptions mean a loss of revenue and higher costs, which leads to a drop in profitability. And businesses can't rely on insurance alone because it doesn't cover all the costs and the customers who move to the competition. It is generally conceived in advance and involves input from key stakeholders and personnel.

Business impact analysis, recovery, organization, and training are all steps corporations need to follow when creating a Business Continuity Plan.

Benefits of a Business Continuity Plan

Businesses are prone to a host of disasters that vary in degree from minor to catastrophic. Business continuity planning is typically meant to help a company continue operating in the event of major disasters such as fires. BCPs are different from a disaster recovery plan, which focuses on the recovery of a company's information technology system after a crisis.

Consider a finance company based in a major city. It may put a BCP in place by taking steps including backing up its computer and client files offsite. If something were to happen to the company's corporate office, its satellite offices would still have access to important information.

An important point to note is that BCP may not be as effective if a large portion of the population is affected, as in the case of a disease outbreak. Nonetheless, BCPs can improve risk management—preventing disruptions from spreading. They can also help mitigate downtime of networks or technology, saving the company money.

How To Create a Business Continuity Plan

There are several steps many companies must follow to develop a solid BCP. They include:

  • Business Impact Analysis : Here, the business will identify functions and related resources that are time-sensitive. (More on this below.)
  • Recovery : In this portion, the business must identify and implement steps to recover critical business functions.
  • Organization : A continuity team must be created. This team will devise a plan to manage the disruption.
  • Training : The continuity team must be trained and tested. Members of the team should also complete exercises that go over the plan and strategies.

Companies may also find it useful to come up with a checklist that includes key details such as emergency contact information, a list of resources the continuity team may need, where backup data and other required information are housed or stored, and other important personnel.

Along with testing the continuity team, the company should also test the BCP itself. It should be tested several times to ensure it can be applied to many different risk scenarios . This will help identify any weaknesses in the plan which can then be corrected.

In order for a business continuity plan to be successful, all employees—even those who aren't on the continuity team—must be aware of the plan.

Business Continuity Impact Analysis

An important part of developing a BCP is a business continuity impact analysis. It identifies the effects of disruption of business functions and processes. It also uses the information to make decisions about recovery priorities and strategies.

FEMA provides an operational and financial impact worksheet to help run a business continuity analysis. The worksheet should be completed by business function and process managers who are well acquainted with the business. These worksheets will summarize the following:

  • The impacts—both financial and operational—that stem from the loss of individual business functions and process
  • Identifying when the loss of a function or process would result in the identified business impacts

Completing the analysis can help companies identify and prioritize the processes that have the most impact on the business's financial and operational functions. The point at which they must be recovered is generally known as the “recovery time objective.”

Business Continuity Plan vs. Disaster Recovery Plan

BCPs and disaster recovery plans are similar in nature, the latter focuses on technology and information technology (IT) infrastructure. BCPs are more encompassing—focusing on the entire organization, such as customer service and supply chain. 

BCPs focus on reducing overall costs or losses, while disaster recovery plans look only at technology downtimes and related costs. Disaster recovery plans tend to involve only IT personnel—which create and manage the policy. However, BCPs tend to have more personnel trained on the potential processes. 

Why Is Business Continuity Plan (BCP) Important?

Businesses are prone to a host of disasters that vary in degree from minor to catastrophic and business continuity plans (BCPs) are an important part of any business. BCP is typically meant to help a company continue operating in the event of threats and disruptions. This could result in a loss of revenue and higher costs, which leads to a drop in profitability. And businesses can't rely on insurance alone because it doesn't cover all the costs and the customers who move to the competition.

What Should a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) Include?

Business continuity plans involve identifying any and all risks that can affect the company's operations. The plan should also determine how those risks will affect operations and implement safeguards and procedures to mitigate the risks. There should also be testing procedures to ensure these safeguards and procedures work. Finally, there should be a review process to make sure that the plan is up to date.

What Is Business Continuity Impact Analysis?

An important part of developing a BCP is a business continuity impact analysis which identifies the effects of disruption of business functions and processes. It also uses the information to make decisions about recovery priorities and strategies.

FEMA provides an operational and financial impact worksheet to help run a business continuity analysis.

These worksheets summarize the impacts—both financial and operational—that stem from the loss of individual business functions and processes. They also identify when the loss of a function or process would result in the identified business impacts.

Business continuity plans (BCPs) are created to help speed up the recovery of an organization filling a threat or disaster. The plan puts in place mechanisms and functions to allow personnel and assets to minimize company downtime. BCPs cover all organizational risks should a disaster happen, such as flood or fire.  

Federal Emergency Management Agency. " Business Process Analysis and Business Impact Analysis User Guide ." Pages 15 - 17.

Ready. “ IT Disaster Recovery Plan .”

Federal Emergency Management Agency. " Business Process Analysis and Business Impact Analysis User Guide ." Pages 15-17.

business continuity and disaster recovery plan definition

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Published: 21 December 2023 Contributors: Mesh Flinders, Ian Smalley

Business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) refers to a process that helps organizations return to normal business operations in the event of a disaster. While the terms business continuity and  disaster recovery  are closely related, they describe two subtly different approaches to crisis management that businesses can take.

As data loss prevention and downtime become more and more expensive, many organizations are upping their investment in emergency management. In 2023, companies worldwide are poised to spend USD 219 billion on cybersecurity and solutions, a 12% increase from last year  according to a recent report by the International Data Corporation (IDC)  (link resides outside ibm.com).

What is a disaster recovery plan?

A  disaster recovery plan (DRP)  is a contingency plan for how an enterprise will recover from an unexpected event. Alongside business continuity plans (BCPs), DR plans help businesses navigate different disaster scenarios, such as massive outages, natural disasters,  ransomware  and  malware  attacks, and many others.

What is a business continuity plan?

Like DRPs, business continuity plans (BCPs) play a critical role in disaster recovery, helping organizations return to normal business functions in the event of a disaster. Where a DRP focusses specifically on IT systems, business continuity management focusses more broadly on various aspects of preparedness.

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Most organizations divide BCDR planning into two separate processes: business continuity and disaster recovery. This is an effective approach because while the two processes share many steps, there are also key differences in how the plans are built, implemented and tested.

The primary difference is that BCPs tend to be proactive, while DRPs tend to be more reactive. It’s good to keep this in mind when building the two parts of your BCDR plan because it governs how the two processes relate to each other. A strong business continuity strategy focuses on processes, procedures and roles that are critical to business operations before, during and immediately following a disaster. DR planning is more geared towards reacting to an incident and taking appropriate actions to recover from it. 

Both processes depend heavily on two critical components, recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO):

  • Recovery time objective (RTO):  RTO refers to the amount of time it takes to restore business processes after an unplanned incident. Establishing a reasonable RTO is one of the first things businesses need do when they’re creating their DRP. 
  • Recovery point objective (RPO):  Your business’ RPO is the amount of data it can afford to lose in a disaster and still recover. Since data protection is a core capability of many modern enterprises, some constantly copy data to a remote  data center  to ensure continuity in case of a massive breach. Others set a tolerable RPO of a few minutes (or even hours) for business data to be recovered from a backup system and know they will be able to recover from whatever was lost during that time.

1.    Conduct business impact analysis (BIA)

To build an effective BCP, you’ll first need to understand the various risks your organization faces. Business impact analysis (BIA) plays a crucial role in risk management and business resilience. BIA is the process of identifying and evaluating the potential impact of a disaster on normal operations. Strong BIA includes an overview of all potential existing threats and vulnerabilities—internal and external—as well as detailed plans for mitigation. Additionally, the BIA must identify the likelihood of an event occurring so the organization can prioritize accordingly.

2.    Design responses

Once your BIA is complete, the next step in building your BCP is planning effective responses to each of the threats you’ve identified. Different threats will naturally require different disaster recovery strategies, so each of your responses should have a detailed plan for how the organization will spot a specific threat and address it.

3.    Identify key roles and responsibilities

This step dictates how key members of your team will respond when facing a crisis or disruptive event. It documents expectations for each team member as well as the resources required for them to fulfill their roles. This is a good part of the process to consider how individuals will communicate in the event of an incident. Some threats will shut down key networks—such as cellular or internet connectivity—so it’s important to have fallback methods of communication your employees can rely on.

4.    Test and update your plan

To be actionable, you need to constantly practice and refine your BCDR plan. Constant testing and training of employees will lead to a seamless deployment when an actual disaster strikes. Rehearse realistic scenarios like cyberattacks, fires, floods, human error, massive outages and other relevant threats so team members can build confidence in their roles and responsibilities.

Like BCPs, DRPs require business impact analysis (BIA)—the outlining of roles and responsibilities and constant testing and refinement. But because DRPs are more reactive in nature, there is more of a focus on risk analysis and  data backup and recovery . Steps 2 and 3 of DRP development, performing risk analysis (RA) and creating an asset inventory are not part of the BCP development process at all. 

Here's a widely used five-step process for creating a DRP:

1.    Conduct business impact analysis

Like in your BCP process, start by assessing each threat your company could face and what its ramifications might be. Consider how potential threats might impact daily operations, regular communication channels and worker safety. Additional considerations for a strong BIA include loss of revenue, cost of downtime, cost of reputational repair (public relations), loss of customers and investors (short and long term) and any incurred penalties from compliance violations.

2.    Analyze risks

DRPs typically require more careful risk assessment than BCPs since their role is to focus on recovery efforts from a potential disaster. During the risk analysis (RA) portion of planning, consider a risk’s likelihood and potential impact on your business.

3.    Create an asset inventory

To create an effective DRP, you must know exactly what your enterprise owns, its purpose/function and its condition. Doing regular asset inventory helps identify hardware, software, IT infrastructure and anything else your organization might own that is crucial to your business operations. Once you’ve identified your assets, you can group them into three categories— critical, important  and  unimportant:

  • Critical:  Only label assets as critical if they are required for normal business operations.
  • Important:  Give this label to assets that are used at least once a day and, if disrupted, would have an impact on business operations (but not shut them down entirely).
  • Unimportant:  These are assets your business uses infrequently that are not essential for normal business operations.

4.    Establish roles and responsibilities

Just like in your BCP development, you’ll need to clearly outline responsibilities and ensure team members have what they need to perform their required duties. Without this crucial step, no one will know how to act during a disaster. Here are some roles and responsibilities to consider when building your DRP:

  • Incident reporter:  Someone who maintains contact information for relevant parties and communicates with business leaders and stakeholders when disruptive events occur.
  • DRP supervisor:  The DRP supervisor ensures team members perform the tasks they’ve been assigned during an incident. 
  • Asset manager:  Someone whose job it is to secure and protect critical assets when a disaster strikes. 
  • Third-party liaison:  The person who coordinates with any third-party vendors or service providers you’ve hired as part of your DRP and updates stakeholders accordingly on how the DRP is going.

5.    Test and refine

Like your BCP, your DRP requires constant practice and refinement to be effective. Practice it regularly and update it according to any meaningful changes that need to be made. For example, if your company acquires a new asset after your DRP has been formed, you’ll need to incorporate it into your plan to ensure it's protected going forward.

When it comes to BCDR planning, every business is going to have its own unique set of needs. Here are a few examples of plans that have proven effective for companies of differing sizes and industries:

  • Crisis management plan:  A crisis management plan, also known as an incident management plan, is a detailed plan for managing a specific incident. It provides detailed instructions on how your organization will respond to a specific kind of crisis, such as a power outage, cyberattack or natural disaster.
  • Communications plan:  A communications plan outlines how your organization will handle public relations (PR) in the event of a disaster. Business leaders typically coordinate with communications specialists to formulate communications plans that complement any crisis management activities needed to keep business operations going during an unplanned incident.
  • Data center recovery plan : A data center recovery plan focuses on the security of a data center facility and its ability to get back up and running after an unplanned incident. Some common threats to data storage include overstretched personnel that can result in human error, cyberattacks, power outages and difficulty following compliance requirements. 
  • Network recovery plan:  Network recovery plans help organizations recover from an interruption of network services, including internet access, cellular data, local area networks (LAN) and wide area networks (WAN). Given the importance of many networked services to business operations, network recovery plans must clearly outline the steps, roles and responsibilities needed to restore services quickly and effectively when a network has been compromised.
  • Virtualized recovery plan:  A virtualized recovery plan  relies on virtual machine (VM) instances that can be ready to operate within a couple of minutes of an interruption. Virtual machines are representations, or emulations, of physical computers that provide critical application recovery through high availability (HA), or the ability of a system to operate continuously without failing.

BCDR planning helps organizations better understand the threats they face and better prepare to face them. Enterprises that don’t undertake BCDR planning face a variety of risks, including data loss, downtime, financial penalties and reputational damage. Effective BCDR planning helps ensure business continuity and the prompt restoration of services in the event of a business disruption. Here are some of the benefits companies with strong BCDR planning enjoy:

When an unplanned incident disrupts business as usual, it can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Additionally, high-profile cyberattacks frequently attract unwanted attention in the press and can result in loss of confidence in both customers and investors. BCDR plans increase an organization’s ability get back up and running swiftly and smoothly after an unplanned incident.

According to  IBM’s recent Cost of Data Breach Report , the average cost of a data breach in 2023 was USD 4.45 million, a 15% increase over the last 3 years. Enterprises with strong BCDR can reduce those costs by helping maintain business continuity throughout an incident and speeding recovery afterwards. Another opportunity for cost-savings with strong BCDR is in cyber insurance. Many insurers simply won’t ensure organizations that don’t have a strong BCDR plan in place.

Data breaches incur hefty fines when private customer information is compromised. Businesses that operate in heavily regulated sectors like healthcare and personal finance face especially costly penalties. Since these penalties are often tied to the duration and severity of a breach, maintaining business continuity and shortening response and recovery lifecycles is critical to keeping financial penalties low.

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Business continuity planning (bcp), what is business continuity.

In an IT context, business continuity is the capability of your enterprise to stay online and deliver products and services during disruptive events, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks and communication failures.

The core of this concept is the business continuity plan — a defined strategy that includes every facet of your organization and details procedures for maintaining business availability.

Start with a business continuity plan

Business continuity management starts with planning how to maintain your critical functions (e.g., IT, sales and support) during and after a disruption.

A business continuity plan (BCP) should comprise the following element

1. Threat Analysis

The identification of potential disruptions, along with potential damage they can cause to affected resources. Examples include:

2. Role assignment

Every organization needs a well-defined chain of command and substitute plan to deal with absence of staff in a crisis scenario. Employees must be cross-trained on their responsibilities so as to be able to fill in for one another.

Internal departments (e.g., marketing, IT, human resources) should be broken down into teams based on their skills and responsibilities. Team leaders can then assign roles and duties to individuals according to your organization’s threat analysis.

3. Communications

A communications strategy details how information is disseminated immediately following and during a disruptive event, as well as after it has been resolved.

Your strategy should include:

  • Methods of communication (e.g., phone, email, text messages)
  • Established points of contact (e.g., managers, team leaders, human resources) responsible for communicating with employees
  • Means of contacting employee family members, media, government regulators, etc.

From electrical power to communications and data, every critical business component must have an adequate backup plan that includes:

  • Data backups to be stored in different locations. This prevents the destruction of both the original and backup copies at the same time. If necessary, offline copies should be kept as well.
  • Backup power sources, such as generators and inverters that are provisioned to deal with power outages.
  • Backup communications (e.g., mobile phones and text messaging to replace land lines) and backup services (e.g., cloud email services to replace on-premise servers).

Load balancing business continuity

Load balancing  maintains business continuity by distributing incoming requests across multiple backend servers in your data center. This provides redundancy in the event of a server failure, ensuring continuous application uptime.

In contrast to the reactive measures used in failover and  disaster recovery  (described below) load balancing is a preventative measure.  Health monitoring  tracks server availability, ensuring accurate load distribution at all times—including during disruptive events.

Disaster recovery plan (DCP) – Your second line of defense

Even the most carefully thought out business continuity plan is never completely foolproof. Despite your best efforts, some disasters simply cannot be mitigated. A disaster recovery plan (DCP) is a second line of defense that enables you to bounce back from the worst disruptions with minimal damage.

As the name implies, a disaster recovery plan deals with the restoration of operations after a major disruption. It’s defined by two factors: RTO and  RPO .

disaster recovery plan

  • Recovery time objective (RTO)  – The acceptable downtime for critical functions and components, i.e., the maximum time it should take to restore services. A different RTO should be assigned to each of your business components according to their importance (e.g., ten minutes for network servers, an hour for phone systems).
  • Recovery point objective (RPO)  – The point to which your state of operations must be restored following a disruption. In relation to backup data, this is the oldest age and level of staleness it can have. For example, network servers updated hourly should have a maximum RPO of 59 minutes to avoid data loss.

Deciding on specific RTOs and RPOs helps clearly show the technical solutions needed to achieve your recovery goals. In most cases the decision is going to boil down to choosing the right failover solution.

See how Imperva Load Balancer can help you with business continuity planning.

Choosing the right failover solutions

Failover  is the switching between primary and backup systems in the event of failure, outage or downtime. It’s the key component of your disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

A failover system should address both RTO and RPO goals by keeping backup infrastructure and data at the ready. Ideally, your failover solution should seamlessly kick in to insulate end users from any service degradation.

When choosing a solution, the two most important aspects to consider are its technological prowess and its service level agreement (SLA). The latter is often a reflection of the former.

For an IT organization charged with the business continuity of a website or web application, there are three failover options:

  • Hardware solutions  – A separate set of servers, set up and maintained internally, are kept on-premise to come online in the event of failure. However, note that keeping such servers at the same location makes them potentially susceptible to being taken down by the same disaster/disturbance.
  • DNS services  – DNS services are often used in conjunction with hardware solutions to redirect traffic to a backup server(s) at an external data center. A downside of this setup includes  TTL-related delays  that can prevent seamless disaster recovery. Additionally, managing both DNS and internal data center hardware failover solutions is time consuming and complicated.
  • On-edge services  – On-edge failover is a managed solution operating from off-prem (e.g., from the  CDN  layer). Such solutions are more affordable and, most importantly, have no TTL reliance, resulting in near-instant failover that allows you to meet the most aggressive RTO goals.

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Business continuity and disaster recovery planning: The basics

Good business continuity plans will keep your company up and running through interruptions of any kind: power failures, IT system crashes, natural disasters, pandemics and more.

storm disaster recovery disruption rain umbrella tornado challenge weather

Editor’s note: This article, originally published on March 27, 2014, has been updated to more accurately reflect recent trends.

Wildfires in California. A snowstorm in Texas.  Windstorms across the Midwest. Floods in Hawaii. Hurricanes in Florida and Louisiana. Russian hackers and ransomware attacks. And let’s not forget the global pandemic.

If anyone still thinks that having a disaster recovery and business continuity plan isn’t a high priority, you haven’t been paying attention to recent events. As we begin to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are shifting to a new normal that will certainly be more remote, more digital and more cloud-based. Disaster recovery plans will have to evolve to keep up with these changing business conditions.

On top of that, business requirements for disaster recovery have changed dramatically. There was a time when it was acceptable for recovery time to be measured in days or hours. Now it’s minutes. In some cases, business units are demanding zero down time in the event of an unplanned outage.

Here are the basics of a state-of-the-art disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) plan for 2021 and beyond. (Without getting too hung up on definitions, let’s say that disaster recovery is getting the IT infrastructure back up and running, while business continuity is a broader discipline that gets the business back up and functioning once the lights are back on.) 

Integrate cybersecurity, intrusion detection/response, disaster recovery into a comprehensive data protection plan

For CISOs, the first goal of a disaster recovery plan is to avoid the disaster in the first place, which is becoming increasingly challenging. First, data is no longer safely tucked away in an on-premises data center. It’s distributed across on-premises environments, hyperscale clouds, the edge and SaaS applications. ESG Research Senior Analyst Christophe Bertrand points out that SaaS presents a serious data protection and recovery challenge because “now you have mission critical applications running as a service that you have no control over.”

Second, the pandemic drove millions of employees out of the secure confines of the corporate office to their home offices, where the Wi-Fi is less secure and where employees might be sharing sensitive data on collaboration applications.

Third, hackers took notice of these expanding attack vectors and launched a barrage of new and more targeted ransomware attacks. According to the Sophos State of Ransomware 2020 Report, hackers have moved from spray-and-pray desktop attacks to server-based attacks. “These are highly targeted, sophisticated attacks that take more effort to deploy. However, they are typically far more deadly due to the higher value of assets encrypted and can cripple organizations with multi-million dollar ransom requests,” according to the report .

In response to these changing conditions, CISOs should focus on beefing up endpoint security for remote workers, deploying VPNs and encryption, protecting data at rest no matter where it lives, and also making sure that collaboration tools don’t become a source of security vulnerabilities.

Conduct a business impact analysis (BIA)

Organizations need to conduct a thorough business impact analysis to identify and evaluate potential effects of disasters through the lenses of financial fallout, regulatory compliance, legal liability, and employee safety. Gartner estimates that 70% of organizations are making disaster recovery decisions without any business-aligned data points or based on an outdated BIA. “Without the fact base the BIA provides, teams can only guess at the appropriate level of DR and what risks are tolerable. This results in overspend or unmet expectations,” according to Gartner.

Remember, you don’t need to protect everything. Organizations that conduct these exercises are often surprised to discover servers that do nothing but run a routine back-end business process once a month, or even once a year.

Organizations need to prioritize applications by their criticality to the business, and to identify all the dependencies associated with a business process, particularly applications that may have been virtualized across multiple physical servers, might be running in containers in the cloud, or in serverless cloud environments.

Classify data

Along the same lines, you don’t need to protect all data, just the data that you need to keep the business running. You do need to go through the process of locating, identifying, and classifying data. Be sure to protect data that falls under regulatory requirements, customer data, patient data, credit card data, intellectual property, private communications, etc. The good news is that tools can automate data identification and classification.

Consider disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)

DRaaS is an increasingly popular option for CISOs at small- to mid-sized organizations who want to cost-effectively improve IT resilience, meet compliance or regulatory requirements, and address resource deficiencies. The DRaaS market is expected to grow at a rate of 12% a year over the next five years, according to Mordor Intelligence . DRaaS services cover the full gamut of disaster recovery and business continuity, providing flexibility and agility to enterprises, according to the Mordor report.

Gartner adds that as the DRaaS market has matured and vendor offerings have become more industrialized, the size and scope of DRaaS implementations have increased significantly, compared with a few years ago.

Develop a solid communication plan

Simply getting servers back up and running is essentially meaningless unless everyone knows their roles and responsibilities. Do people have the appropriate cell phone numbers and email addresses to share information? Do the relevant stakeholders have a playbook that spells out how to respond to a crisis in terms of contacting law enforcement, outside legal teams, utility companies, key technology and supply chain partners, senior leadership, the broader employee base, external PR teams, etc.?

Depending on the nature of the disaster, networking groups might need to establish new lines of connectivity for remote workers and reconfigure traffic flows; maintenance teams might need to perform remote troubleshooting, security teams might need to re-set firewalls, change access policies, extend security protection to new devices or to cloud-based resources. The biggest problem in a disaster isn’t related to data backups, it’s not having the right people in place and understanding all the steps required for the business to recover, says Bertrand.

Automate testing

To test disaster preparedness, companies traditionally conduct tabletop exercises in which key players physically come together to play out DR scenarios. However, only one-third of organizations perceive the exercises as “highly effective,”  according to a July study  by Osterman Research in association with Immersive Labs, a company that develops human-readiness skills in cybersecurity. The research also found that organizations don’t perform tabletop exercises often enough to keep up with evolving threats and that these exercises cost an average of $30,000. During the pandemic, it’s fair to assume that tabletop exercises fell by the wayside.

Doug Matthews, vice-president of enterprise data protection at Veritas, says there’s a better way. New tools can automatically test backup and recovery procedures on an ongoing basis and identify potential issues that need to be addressed. Modern testing solutions are also able to use sandboxing technology to create safe environments in which companies can test the recoverability of applications without impacting production networks.

Create immutable data backups

Ransomware attackers are targeting backup repositories, particularly in the cloud. They are also targeting SaaS applications. In response, organizations should keep one copy of data that can’t be altered. “Be sure that you have an immutable copy of backup data that nobody can touch,” advises Matthews, who says companies should have three copies of data at all times, not just two.

Companies should also investigate isolated recovery environments, such as air gapping, in which one copy of the data lives in an environment not connected to the production environment.

Consider data re-use

“Business is the data and data is the business,” says Bertrand. Once organizations have a copy of their important data sitting in a safe backup environment, why not think about ways to reuse it to advance the company’s digital transformation efforts.

The idea is for organizations to “understand what you have, where it is, how to protect it, store it and optimize it.”  Ultimately, Bertrand predicts that organizations will evolve an intelligent data strategy that encompasses regulatory compliance, disaster recovery/business continuity and data analytics.

Perform continuous updates

CISOs updating their DR/BC plans should take their cue from DevOps. It’s not about one-and-done, it’s about continuous improvement. DR planners need to be plugged into any changes at the company that might affect recoverability, including employees working from home permanently, stores or remote offices opening or closing, applications being replaced by SaaS, data moving to the edge, or DevOps moving to the cloud. Also, the technology is constantly improving, so be on the lookout for new tools that can help automate DR/BC processes. The plan should not be sitting on the shelf collecting dust. It should be updated on a regular basis.

Do long-term planning

In light of everything that has happened over the past 12 months, it’s a good time to shift thinking about DR/BC from reactive to proactive. Unfortunately, between public health emergencies, climate change and the increase in cyberattacks, disasters seem to be occurring more often and are certainly more devastating. DR/BC plans need to get ahead of the threats, not simply respond to them.

For example, if your company is in California, your DR/BC plan has to assume that there will be power outages from next season’s wildfires. Companies concerned about losing power when the next natural disaster hits might want to think about generating their own power from alternative sources.

A successful DR/BC plan requires that companies perform the basics, but it is also an opportunity for companies to find creative and innovative ways to keep the business running when disaster hits.

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Neal Weinberg is a freelance technology writer and editor. He can be reached at [email protected] .

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Business continuity vs disaster recovery: The difference explained

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If you’re in IT, you’ve definitely heard business continuity plans (BCP) and disaster recovery plans (DRP) mentioned together. Sometimes, these two are merged into one acronym spelled out as “BCDR”. And while BCP and DRP are closely related, they solve for fundamentally distinct issues.

Before defining their differences, it’s vital to understand just how important a role BCP and DRP play in an organization. Specifically, BCP and DRP help an organization continue operating. Disruptions in business are inevitable. Without a plan, the core functions of the business cannot run smoothly, and this can impact the bottom line.

For instance, when natural disasters strike small to medium businesses, many are never able to recover. Even if they initially recover, 25% of SMBs are out of business within a year following a disaster. And the number of costly disasters is only increasing. NOAA (National Centers for Environmental Information) reports that in the last five years, the number of billion-plus dollar disasters (adjusted for inflation) in the United States has increased to an average of 17.8 events per year , whereas the average between 1980-2022 was just 7.9 events per year.

Today we’ll examine the Venn diagram between BCP and DRP; how they complement each other, overlap, and combine to help protect a business from significant disruption during disasters.

Let’s dive in.

What Is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan spells out how an organization will continue to run while experiencing a disaster or major disruption. These can include things like natural disasters, data breaches, strong economic downturns, hardware failures, and human errors. The core goal of a business continuity plan is to keep the business’ core functions operational throughout the disruption.

A business continuity plan is tailored to the specific needs of your organization. However, the components listed below comprise the core of a strong plan.

Identification of critical business processes and resources

What are your business’ major functions? What resources are necessary to maintain those functions? Which processes should take precedence when a disaster occurs?

For example, if your firm is a food processing organization, some of the critical business processes could include:

  • Sourcing raw materials
  • Manufacturing products
  • Inspecting products for safety
  • Delivering finished products to retail stores and customers
  • Employee management and payroll

 Establish roles for participants and stakeholders

Another important component is a clause spelling out stakeholders and their roles. Knowing who’s responsible for what in times of disruption ensures a business runs smoothly throughout a disaster.

  • An emergency preparedness manager is responsible for ensuring employees and customers are safe.
  • An emergency management director develops and carries out the plan for the business to follow
  • A disaster program manager is responsible for organizing other services, including shelters or triage centers.
  • A large business may want to put together a committee of individuals responsible for different areas of the organization including technology and communication.

Detailed documentation

Every bit of data and workflow needs to be detailed and recorded in the BCP. When a disaster strikes, your organization will know exactly what to do and in which order since there’s a recorded blueprint decided upon beforehand. At minimum, evacuation policies need to be documented, contact lists need to be created and the participants and stakeholders listed above need to create plans for their areas of responsibility. If hazardous materials are at play, a separate plan needs to be made for handling. Disasters are chaotic; a documented plan helps make them less so. After a decision is made, write it down and store it somewhere that everyone knows about and can access.

Business impact analysis

What will the organization lose when a certain disruption strikes? For example, one cybersecurity report estimates small businesses lose almost  $8,600 an hour  during unplanned downtime, so being able to  protect your business from downtime  is paramount.

What specific losses will the organization incur? Organizations are faced with losses including declines to output and revenue, harmed reputation, impact of client or customer wellbeing, disruption to flow or delivery of services.

Defined (and documented) RTO and RPO

The recovery time objective (RTO) details how long systems, processes, or data can be impacted  without fatally affecting a business. For instance, if your RTO is 3 hours, operations must be running again within 3 hours of a disaster.

Conversely, the recovery point objective (RPO) outlines how much data an organization is willing to lose during a disruption. For example, if an enterprise’s RPO is 15 minutes, the organization must have a data backup every 15 minutes to achieve the RPO goal.

When creating your BCP, you’ll need to set the RTO and define the RPO. The goal of both is to minimize the chances of data loss and speed up the resumption of operations. But, it is not possible to have zero downtime or zero data loss. RPO and RTO can’t be based on hope or idealism but have to be based on what is realistically achievable (in terms of feasibility and cost), balanced with what is critical for business viability.

Testing in advance of actual disruption

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy” so… it’s probably best if that first encounter happens in testing. You will not be able to control for every eventuality but, the more you test and prepare the smaller your risk surface is. That’s why it’s critical to test how your plan holds up during a simulated disaster. Unfortunately,  23% of organizations never test their BCP or DRP . Don’t be one of those 23%; please.

There are a few ways to test your BCP. First, you can create a checklist. Second, walk through the exercises. And third, you can produce simulations and ensure your plan is built to protect your organization to the fullest.

A BCP test seeks to find out the following:

  • If the plan works when disaster strikes
  • Gaps and opportunities within the plan
  • Whether the business can meet its RTO and RPO goals
  • Whether the emergency communication plan will be effective

Testing your plan simulating the disruptions most likely to affect your organization is crucial. Data breaches or loss, human error, climate disasters, hardware failure, and power outages are common disruptions to test in advance.

Testing should happen once per year, and a commonly employed mechanism to do so is a  tabletop exercise .

business continuity and disaster recovery plan definition

What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

A disaster recovery plan is detailed documentation showing how a business can quickly recover operations after an unplanned incident. For example, a data breach disaster recovery plan might include how it will restore data access and IT infrastructure after the breach. Even though they are often used interchangeably the DRP is usually a component of the business’ larger BCP. Every disaster requires continuity but not every continuity issue is as the result of a disaster. 

The main objectives of the DRP include the following:

  • Keep infrastructure and human resources safe
  • Guarantee continued business operations
  • Minimize financial losses
  • Protect organizational data
  • Prevent reputation loss
  • Limit liability

Below are the most vital components of the disaster recovery plan:

  • A summary of critical processes, resources, and systems
  • Stakeholders responsible for these processes, resources, and systems
  • Detailed steps to recover, restart, and reconfigure the critical processes and systems
  • RTO and RPO
  • Any other emergency and mitigation steps that are essential to recovering after a disaster

Before creating the disaster recovery plan , you’ll need to conduct a disaster impact analysis and document risks associated with respective disasters. Doing so helps you identify which resources are needed where and how long it will take to bounce back.

How are BCP and DRP Similar?

BCP and DRP both work to ensure that an organization’s core functions are not hindered in times of disaster. They take a proactive approach to protect the organization and minimize loss during disasters. When creating both plans, you’ll need to account for business critical processes, systems, and resources. You’ll also need to define the RTO and the RPO when creating both plans. Another essential overlap between the two is the need for impact analysis and testing before making the plan official.

Finally, neither plan is set in stone. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans require constant review to align with changes in IT infrastructure, organizational goals, and existing threats.

How Do BCP and DRP Differ?

BCP and DRP complement each other and overlap during planning, but they have different functions. For starters, the business continuity plan is typically focused on organization-wide strategic planning. A disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, details how an organization can continue to run specifically during or after a disaster.

A BCP broadly covers every necessary detail, including the resources, processes, IT systems, and stakeholders across the business and covers a variety of issues which a business may face (including things like succession planning). More importantly, the BCP outlines step-by-step what needs to happen during and after a certain disaster.

A disaster recovery plan is a fundamental part of the business continuity plan. Often the DRP focuses on IT and how an organization will recover or restore IT infrastructure, applications, and systems critical to business operations following a disaster (physical, cyber, natural etc).

Put simply: the key difference is that the DRP assumes something has already happened, while the BCP includes components intended to prevent issues in the first place.

Be Ready with CrashPlan

Disaster and disruptions don’t discriminate based on whether you’re a small business or an enterprise. If disaster strikes and you’re not prepared, you risk heavy financial loss, damaged reputation, and potential liability.

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans add a layer of protection for when disasters occur. They’re a proactive approach to ensure you’re minimally impacted by disruption. Data recovery is a critical piece of this puzzle; how can your operations continue after a disaster without access to your data?

CrashPlan’s automatic cloud backup gives you immediate, easy access to endpoint data after hardware failure, natural disasters, data breaches, or any other calamity.

Find out today how CrashPlan helps you safeguard and access your organization’s data during disasters.

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What Is Business Continuity?

What is business continuity

Business continuity is an organization's ability to maintain or quickly resume acceptable levels of product or service delivery following a short-term event that disrupts normal operations. Examples of disruptions range from natural disasters to power outages.

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Is business continuity the same as business resilience or disaster recovery?

Business continuity, disaster recovery, and business resilience are not the same, but they are related.

  • Business continuity is a process-driven approach to maintaining operations in the event of an unplanned disruption such as a cyber attack or natural disaster. Business continuity planning covers the entire business—processes, assets, workers, and more. It isn't focused solely on IT infrastructure and business systems.
  • Business resilience encompasses crisis management and business continuity. It requires a response to all types of risk that an organization may face. An organization that is business resilient is essentially in a constant state of "expecting the unexpected." It means continuously preparing to meet disruptions head-on, including events of extended duration that may affect more than one facility or region.
  • Disaster recovery focuses specifically on how to restore an enterprise's IT infrastructure and business systems following a disruption. It is considered an element of business continuity. A business continuity plan (BCP) might contain several disaster recovery plans, for example.

What is a business continuity strategy?

A business continuity strategy is a summary of the mitigation, crisis, and recovery plans to be implemented after a disruption to resume normal operations. "Business continuity strategy" is often used interchangeably with "business continuity plan." Both consider the broader goals, legal and regulatory requirements, personnel, and even the business's clients and partners.

What does a business continuity plan mitigate?

A relevant and well-tested BCP can help ease the negative impacts of an unexpected business disruption in many ways.

  • Financial impact: Disruptions to product supply chains and critical services to customers can directly affect sales and revenue. Downtime caused by unplanned disruptions can also result in higher costs for a business as it looks to repair operations and mitigate previously unidentified threats.
  • Reputation and brand impact: Failure to resume operations quickly and supply customers with the products or services they expect can prompt customer defections and tarnish the brand. Damage to reputation can in turn cause investors and capital sources to pull back funding, exacerbating the financial impact of a business disruption.
  • Regulatory impact: Customers and vendors are likely to complain when businesses fail to respond appropriately to disruptions, which may result in regulatory scrutiny or even censure. In highly-regulated industries, such as energy and financial services, business continuity planning is mandatory to ensure regulatory compliance.

Business continuity planning activities

A well-crafted and tested BCP can go a long way toward helping a business recover swiftly from a disruption. These are key steps a business may want to take.

Identifying critical business areas and functions

Business continuity planning begins with identifying an organization's key business areas and the critical functions within those areas. A business needs to determine and document the acceptable downtime for each area and function considered vital to operations. Then a plan to restore operations can be established, documented, and communicated.

Analyzing risks, threats, and potential impacts

Creating appropriate response scenarios requires knowing what disruptions the business could experience. An upfront analysis of risks and threats is necessary in order to prepare contingency responses to events. Organizations can also conduct a back-end analysis after an event to gather metrics and assess lessons learned. This information can drive improvements in how the business responds to disruptions.

Outlining and assigning responsibilities

A BCP details which personnel will be responsible for implementing specific aspects of the plan. It also identifies key decision-makers and a chain of command. The plan should include alternative options in case primary personnel are incapacitated or unavailable to respond to the disruption.

Defining and documenting alternatives

A business continuity plan should define and document alternative communication strategies in case telephone services or the internet are down. Enterprises should also have alternatives for mission-critical spaces such as data centers or manufacturing facilities in case buildings are damaged.

Assessing the need for critical backups

Essential equipment may be damaged or unavailable during a disruptive event. A business should consider whether it has access to backup equipment and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) during extended power outages. Business-critical data needs to be backed up regularly, and is mandatory in many regulated industries.

Testing, training, and communication

Business continuity plans need to be tested to ensure they will be effective. (Disaster recovery plans should be tested as well.) A best practice is to conduct a plan review at least quarterly with leadership and key team members who are responsible for executing the plan.

Many companies use role-playing sessions, simulations, and other types of exercises several times per year to test their BCPs. This approach helps to identify gaps, develop strategies for improvement, and determine if more resources are needed. Targeted staff training and communicating to the whole workforce the benefits of having a business continuity plan are also vital to its success.

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What Is a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) Plan and Why Is It Important?

The worst thing any organization could face is an unexpected and forced suspension of all its activities. Threats differ in nature and magnitude, but the one thing they have in common is that they are a menace to your organization’s operations and critical data.

There is absolutely no way to guarantee that your organization will never face a disaster. However, there are measures you can take to mitigate the damage and quickly restart operations. A business continuity plan (BCP) is the perfect starting point. This blog post helps you understand what a BCP is and how you can create a personalized plan for your organization.

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What Is Business Continuity?

Business continuity is the list of procedures that allows a company to resume its mission-critical operations as quickly as possible following a disruptive event. It is a comprehensive strategy that combines all available resources while specifying individual and organizational responsibilities. A business continuity plan details the essential services, such as IT infrastructure and communication channels, that should be maintained during disruption and the steps to achieve that.

A simple human error, a hardware failure, a fire, a ransomware attack, or a full-scale natural disaster can impact day-to-day operations or, even worse, cause an organization to shut down entirely. In fact, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) states that about 25% of businesses do not reopen after a disaster, with many more failing in the months or years following a disaster.

What Is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) is a sequence of procedures designed to restore essential business activities as soon as possible, followed by restoring less critical workloads during a disruptive incident. This is known as disaster recovery (DR). In other words, the primary goal of DR is to minimize downtime and restart all systems and applications while reducing data loss.

Time is of the essence here since your losses increase by the minute. Everyone involved should rely on a well-defined plan and conduct each step correctly. Organizations usually resort to data protection techniques like backup or replication to almost instantly recover their data and, subsequently, operations.

Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery: Key Differences

Instead of thinking of business continuity and disaster recovery as two different strategies, it is better to view them as complementary. Disaster recovery is an integral part of any business continuity plan (BCP).

To further understand these concepts, think of your business as a ship struck by disaster and is now sinking. In this case, BCP is the emergency training you have conducted before setting sail, explaining what to do and where to go to those on board. DR will come into play when the catastrophe actually happens and everyone is rushing to complete their part so they can collectively mitigate the damage as fast as they can.

Think of DR as the practical implementation of BCP and, by combining them, your company can have an effective BCDR plan.

How to Build an Effective BCDR Plan

Organizations have varying structures, goals, and even weaknesses, which is why a BCDR plan should be personalized based on your requirements and strategies. It is also essential to consider that disasters differ in nature, and you should prepare yourself for all possible scenarios.

First things first, think about what you want to achieve with this plan. Obviously, minimizing the risk and impact of a disruption is your topmost priority. With that in mind, below are the steps you need to take to take your BCDR plan:

1.   Evaluate your organization and identify the weaknesses

Start by thoroughly assessing each department within your company and list the security gaps that can lead to unwanted downtime and address each one. If the discovered vulnerabilities require additional tools or updates, make sure to implement them.

Most organizations report the following security gaps:

  • Outdated hardware such as servers and computers
  • Older versions of operating systems and software
  • Unsafe network connections
  • Absence of modern data protection solutions

Employee behavior can also be a security vulnerability due to social engineering and ransomware attacks. Employee security training sessions can help raise awareness about online behavior.

2.   Choose the response team

No plan is complete without a team. Ensure that all members are fully aware of their roles and responsibilities. To do so, establish clear communication channels between those involved and keep everyone informed on the latest developments and updates.

Vital team members usually included in a BCDR plan are senior management executives, IT professionals, information security officers, heads of departments, and business partners.

3.   Identify critical data and workloads

The third step is to classify your data based on importance. In other words, you should determine which workloads are crucial for staying operational and generating revenue. For example, prioritize data subject to regulations, machines containing financial logs and billing systems, among others to avoid lengthy downtime, irreparable damage and compliance issues. Conduct frequent backups and safely store this data so you can quickly recover it in case of a disaster.

4.   Define RTOs and RPOs

Once you know which data and machines are critical for your organization’s continuity, you can then decide on recovery targets for each type of machine and data. One of the main steps is determining recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). These two core parameters represent how much downtime and loss of data you can reasonably tolerate before services are restored.

5.   Test and review your plan regularly

The worst time to find out that you have an outdated and ineffective BCDR plan is after a disaster takes place. Conduct frequent and full-scale testing at regular intervals. Today’s data protection solutions allow you to verify if backups and replicas are usable. You can also run site recovery jobs, test failover to replica and failback to verify that systems can be restored and all the changes are preserved.

It is advisable to perform emergency drills to ensure that all participants are prepared and can complete their responsibilities as quickly as possible. Based on the results of your tests, you should be able to assess the plan and update to better meet your recovery objectives and adapt to new threats.

Business Continuity Plan Checklist

A business continuity checklist can come in handy when designing a BCDR plan:

  • Identify the disaster response team and key members.
  • Determine the departments and business services that could be affected by a disaster.
  • Conduct risk assessment and impact analysis.
  • Create a recovery and/or contingency plan for different services.
  • Specify recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).
  • Ensure that your sensitive data is protected.
  • Choose a disaster recovery (DR) site for network and data failover.
  • Test your business continuity plan and eliminate vulnerabilities.

How to Achieve  Disaster Recovery Preparedness with NAKIVO

You can implement NAKIVO Backup & Replication as part of your BCDR plan for swift recovery during and after incidents. The solution can help you meet your organization’s RTOs and RPOs, apply the 3-2-1 backup strategy , and restore critical data and workloads.

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NAKIVO delivers all the functionalities needed to prepare for unplanned disruptions and recover swiftly:

  • Incremental and app-aware backups : Perform efficient backups while maintaining data consistency.
  • Immutable backups : Protect your backups and backup copies from ransomware encryption, deletion or modification by applying immutability in the cloud or Linux-based repositories.
  • Replication onsite and offsite : Create copies of your VMs and store them onsite or at a secondary location to ensure business continuity.
  • Advanced storage tiering : Eliminate a single point of failure by creating multiple backups and copies, storing them on different storage media and keeping at least one copy offsite.
  • Backup and replica verification : Test and verify the recoverability of your backups and replicas without disrupting the production environment.
  • Instant recovery : Quickly recover full VMs or individual files/app objects to minimize downtime.
  • Built-in DR orchestration : Automate workload failover or failback to VM replicas to continue operation in case of a disaster with Site Recovery .

Now more than ever, it is essential for organizations to prepare for any disaster that can impact their data and damage business operations. Having a well-developed BCDR plan can help you mitigate the risks, minimize downtime and ensure that your sensitive data is quickly recovered after a disruptive incident.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides numerous tools to ensure optimal data protection. With features like incremental and app-aware backups, instant recovery and ransomware protection, the NAKIVO solution allows you to safeguard your data and guarantee business continuity.

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Many professionals operate under the assumption that their workplace will remain largely unchanged from one day to the next, finding comfort in rhythms and routines. Sometimes, however, events disrupt business as usual. A critical aspect of leadership is preparing for those interruptions, creating strategies and plans that can keep core business functions intact even under duress.

Two specific fields address potential business interruptions: business continuity and disaster recovery. These disciplines minimize the impact that a catastrophic event might have on a business’s ability to reliably deliver its products and services.

While both fields are important, and even similar in some aspects, they are not synonymous. There are important differences in business continuity vs. disaster recovery, and those in leadership or emergency preparedness roles can benefit from understanding the core distinctions.

One way to develop a clear understanding of business continuity vs. disaster recovery is through studying emergency management. An online program in this field can offer professionals the skills needed to successfully lead companies through different kinds of crises.

Why Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Matter

Business continuity outlines exactly how a business will proceed during and following a disaster. It may provide contingency plans, outlining how the business will continue to operate even if it has to move to an alternate location. Business continuity planning may also take into account smaller interruptions or minor disasters, such as extended power outages.

Disaster recovery refers to the plans a business puts into place for responding to a catastrophic event, such as a natural disaster, fire, act of terror, active shooter or cybercrime. Disaster recovery involves the measures a business takes to respond to an event and return to safe, normal operation as quickly as possible.

The Importance of Advanced Planning

When businesses face disasters and don’t have the proper plans in place, the effects can be catastrophic. The most obvious effect is financial loss; the longer a business goes without delivering its products and services, the greater its financial losses. Eventually, these losses may force a business to make tough decisions, such as cutting employees. But there can also be technological consequences, including the loss of important or sensitive data.

Having business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place can help companies minimize the consequences of a catastrophic event. They can also provide peace of mind; employees and business owners alike may feel more comfortable in a work setting where there are clear policies for how to respond to disasters.

In many companies, crisis management professionals are responsible for developing and implementing these plans, evaluating and revising them as needed, and training employees to ensure they know how to follow the specified strategies.

Similarities Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning often seem interdependent. While the two concepts are not the same, they overlap in some areas and work best when developed in tandem.

  • Both are proactive strategies that help a business prepare for sudden, cataclysmic events. Instead of reacting to a disaster, both disciplines take a preemptive approach, seeking to minimize the effects of a catastrophe before it occurs.
  • Businesses can use both to prepare for a range of ecological and human-made disasters. Business continuity and disaster recovery are instrumental to preparing for pandemics, natural disasters, wildfires and even cyberattacks.
  • Both require regular review, and they may sometimes require revision to ensure they match the company’s evolving goals. An emergency management leader will continually test and modify these plans as needed.

Differences Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

A closer look at business continuity vs. disaster recovery reveals some key distinctions. Ultimately, these differences highlight the fact that businesses need to have plans of both kinds in place to be sufficiently prepared for disaster.

  • Business continuity focuses on keeping business operational during a disaster, while disaster recovery focuses on restoring data access and IT infrastructure after a disaster. In other words, the former is concerned with keeping the shop open even in unusual or unfavorable circumstances, while the latter focuses on returning it to normal as expediently as possible.
  • Unlike business continuity plans, disaster recovery strategies may involve creating additional employee safety measures, such as conducting fire drills or purchasing emergency supplies. Combining the two allows a business to place equal focus on maintaining operations and ensuring that employees are safe.
  • Business continuity and disaster recovery have different goals. Effective business continuity plans limit operational downtime, whereas effective disaster recovery plans limit abnormal or inefficient system function. Only by combining the two plans can businesses comprehensively prepare for disastrous events.
  • A business continuity strategy can ensure communication methods such as phones and network servers continue operating in the midst of a crisis. Meanwhile, a disaster recovery strategy helps to ensure an organization’s ability to return to full functionality after a disaster occurs. To put it differently, business continuity focuses on keeping the lights on and the business open in some capacity, while disaster recovery focuses on getting operations back to normal.
  • Some businesses may incorporate disaster recovery strategies as part of their overall business continuity plans. Disaster recovery is one step in the broader process of safeguarding a company against all contingencies.

Leadership in Times of Crisis

Crisis management is an important skill for all business leaders. In fact, crisis management draws upon many of the other skills necessary for business success. Analytical and problem-solving skills as well as flexibility in decision making are essential for assessing potential threats and determining how to proactively address them. Communication skills, both verbal and written, are necessary for articulating a plan and training employees on how they should act in response to a crisis.

“Leadership in managing crises can minimize the damage imposed by an incident while lack of effective leadership worsens the impact,” says Naim Kapucu, Pegasus Professor and director of the School of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida (UCF) . “Organizations should have leaders with crisis management competencies to effectively manage disasters and crises based on the contingencies and environmental and organizational factors.”

Crisis management skills matter because any company can experience a catastrophe that limits its ability to function as normal, and often it will have little time to pivot and adapt. “Crises are not a good time to reorganize adequately operating organizational systems, much less try to implement wholesale organizational changes or reforms,” says Kapucu. Having a plan in place, ready to be executed, can make all the difference. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into stark relief the uncertainty that businesses face and the extreme disruptions that can take place.

Programs such as the University of Central Florida’s online Master of Emergency and Crisis Management can help leaders fortify the knowledge, competencies, and skills they need to help their enterprises weather these times of crisis.

Crisis Management Careers

Crisis management is a key part of several careers. Each of the following positions offers a different level of leadership through tumultuous times.

Emergency Management Director

Emergency management directors develop and execute the plans that businesses follow to respond to natural disasters and other emergencies. Strong analytical, problem-solving, delegation and communication skills are essential. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual median salary for emergency management directors in 2019 was $74,590.

Disaster Program Manager

Disaster program managers may coordinate shelters, manage triage centers or organize other services in the wake of a disaster. These professionals must be skilled in remaining calm under extreme pressure; empathy and understanding are also important. The annual median salary for this role was around $48,000, according to May 2020 PayScale data.

Geographic Systems Information Coordinator

Geographic systems information coordinators use a wide range of data sources, such as land surveys, to help anticipate and prepare for different disasters. Technical skills and data analysis competencies are vital for success in this role. PayScale reports that the annual median salary for these coordinators was around $58,000 as of May 2020.

Emergency Preparedness Manager

Emergency preparedness managers are typically responsible for making sure employees and customers are safe. They may report directly to the emergency preparedness director, whose role is more comprehensive. The annual median salary of emergency preparedness managers was around $69,000 as of May 2020, according to PayScale.

Developing a Career in Emergency Management

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans help businesses prepare for worst-case scenarios; they provide peace of mind, a sense of stability and key safeguards against major loss and disruption. The University of Central Florida’s online Master of Emergency and Crisis Management (MECM) degree program helps professionals prepare for this important work.

The MECM curriculum exposes students to key emergency management skills, including developing, testing and communicating plans. It emphasizes the financial, ethical, political and practical dimensions of disaster response. Find out more about the MECM degree program today and embark on a new career on the front lines of crisis management.

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Disaster recovery plan vs. business continuity plan: Is there a difference?

Person evaluating the difference between a disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan

Disaster recovery and business continuity are two terms often used interchangeably ' but doing so risks missing some of the key differences between the two strategies. To debunk the disaster recovery plan vs. business continuity plan debate, we look at:

  • What each means
  • Where the two are similar
  • How they differ
  • Why they are often confused
  • Whether your organization needs both

What is Business Continuity?

Definitions of a business continuity plan vary, as you'd expect; as with any corporate strategy term, there are different interpretations. But while definitions may diverge slightly, the general understanding is that a business continuity plan (BCP) is designed to ensure that your business can maintain its operations in the event of a disaster, whatever form that might take. On the other hand, a disaster recovery plan focuses on how your organization will recover and rebuild following any crisis. IT firm Phoenix NAP believes that 'Disaster Recovery (DR) versus Business Continuity (BC) are two entirely different strategies, each of which plays a significant aspect in safeguarding business operations.' Best practice business continuity plans follow a set pattern with some standard features. A comprehensive BCP will:

  • Identify the potential risks your business faces
  • Allocate responsibility, putting in place the teams you need to continue operations
  • Be built on best practice subsidiary and entity data
  • Make back-up arrangements for power, systems and communications
  • Prepare for recovery, identifying your disaster recovery team and the steps you will take to build back

This last point is where the potential 'grey area' between business continuity and disaster recovery starts to become apparent. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity planning and a vital element of a BCP. As well as planning for an immediate crisis-driven response, a business continuity plan should consider 'what happens next.' It's not just about how you deal with the immediate aftermath of a crisis, whether that's a cyber-attack, fire, flood, terrorist attack or any other human-made or natural disaster. It's about what you do next to restore operations on a more permanent footing. This is where the disaster recovery element of your planning comes in.

What is Disaster Recovery?

The disaster recovery plan and business continuity are very closely interlinked. Disaster recovery is the process of ' as you might imagine ' recovering after any business interruption or crisis. As InvenioIT puts it, 'A disaster recovery plan ...aims to answer the question: 'How do we recover from a disaster?'' What does a disaster recovery plan entail? It is typically a formal document, with details of steps needed to ensure you can recover rapidly from any disruption. IBM believes that a DR plan is more focused than a business continuity plan; as we said above, a subset of the BCP that focuses on how you recover your IT and systems to ensure operations return to normal as soon as possible. These formalized plans came into being in the 1970s. Businesses switched from being paper-based operations to ones dependent on systems and computer-based operations, technologies that require rapid response and clear action plans for contingency and recovery. Minimizing downtime by having recovery plans for your IT infrastructure and other operations means businesses can reduce the length and impact of any unexpected disruption.

Disaster Recovery Plan vs. Business Continuity Plan: How Do BCP and DR Plans Differ?

What is the difference between a disaster recovery plan and a business continuity plan? Given that you need to consider both business continuity and disaster recovery, it's worth exploring the two differences. Partly, as we mentioned above, the difference is about scope. The BCP is broad, while a DR plan will be more focused, looking specifically at how to get systems up and running in the aftermath of a disaster. An IT disaster can take many forms, from a localized hardware failure to a company-wide data breach ' and can have huge ramifications, with some 93% of businesses suffering an IT disaster going on to file for bankruptcy within a year . Another difference is in timing; the BCP should kick in as soon as a disruption is identified. Potentially, this means moving to back-up servers, power generators, remote working. On the other hand, the recovery plan tends to follow once the initial emergency response is in place, looking further ahead to determine how the business will rebuild and return to more normal operations. In either case, a written plan is vital, including a detailed business impact analysis that should be updated regularly. We've written before about the importance of keeping your business continuity plan up-to-date ' a lack of accurate data on your systems can significantly impact your ability to maintain operations and recover longer-term. Central to this is the need to maintain accurate information on all your entities and subsidiaries . Doing so enables you to methodically record the systems and technologies that will be impacted by an outage across the entirety of your organization. Once you're confident that you have captured all the applications and hardware you need to consider, your disaster recovery plan should include:

  • Detailed plans for restoring each of these critical applications and pieces of infrastructure
  • The timeframe for doing so
  • The people who need to be involved ' along with emergency contact details to ensure they can be contacted in the event of any communications interruption

The ramifications of a disaster can be significant for an organization, including lost income, reputational damage, regulatory breaches and associated penalties, financial or otherwise, and missed opportunities for business growth while recovery is prioritized. The 'disaster recovery plan vs. business continuity plan' debate, then, is slightly spurious ' because you clearly need both. Having defined plans, both to respond in the immediate aftermath of a crisis, and to recover following the initial crisis period, is essential. To help organizations with their planning, both for business continuity and disaster recovery, Diligent has long-standing expertise and a suite of solutions. The software supports businesses that manage entities, compliance and organizational documents, enabling companies to minimize and mitigate the risks posed by any disruption. You can find out more by getting in touch to request a demo.

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Creating an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan for Business Continuity

January 25, 2024

by Bhavani Shanmugam

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In this post

What is a disaster recovery plan , what is the purpose of a disaster recovery plan, disaster recovery plan checklist, disaster recovery best practices.

  • Differences between business continuity and disaster recovery plan

Disasters are a constant threat to businesses and organizations.

Whether it's a natural disaster, cyber attack, or any other event, the potential data loss has severe consequences, including damage to business reputation, customer trust, and revenue. In some cases, a disaster leads to a business’ end.

That's why having a disaster recovery or DR plan to ensure business continuity by establishing a resilient IT infrastructure is so crucial to the survival of any company.

In this article, we detail how to create a disaster recovery plan for your business and the best practices to follow to protect yourself from catastrophe.

A disaster recovery plan is a detailed strategy that organizations can develop to protect their IT Infrastructure and to guarantee their survival in the event of data loss, such as cyber attacks, natural disasters, or hardware and software failures.

A disaster recovery plan comprises strategies like data backup, data replication , offsite copies, and data recovery methods to ensure business continuity by minimizing downtime.

Employees can refer to the disaster recovery plan to learn about necessary, company-specific protocols to follow before, during, and after a disaster.

No matter the size or type of organization, your company needs to invest in a disaster recovery plan. 

Risk mitigation

A disaster recovery plan proactively prepares businesses for different kinds of disaster situations by identifying potential risks and developing mitigation techniques.

Business continuity

A disaster recovery plan protects business continuity after data loss, enabling organizations to bring back critical IT systems, applications, and data online. This will get the business up and running again with fewer productivity disruptions.

Data protection

With a robust disaster recovery plan in place, you can ensure complete data protection for the entire IT infrastructure that runs single or diverse platforms - virtual, physical, cloud, and SaaS applications.

A disaster recovery plan allows businesses to recover quickly from any data loss and ensures that the company's valuable asset - data, is always available for business operations.

Adherence to data protection and disaster recovery planning regulations is non-negotiable for several businesses and countries.

Compliance enables you to avoid legal issues and potential fines for businesses. Make sure compliance requirements are a part of your disaster recovery plan. 

Less productivity disruption

Whenever a disaster strikes or data loss occurs in any way, it hinders business productivity. However, a well-structured disaster recovery plan helps organizations maintain operational stability, recover data, and continue business operations without interruption.

Customer trust

Your reliability instills confidence in customers, which paves the way for long-term client relationships. To do this, you need a resilient disaster recovery plan that empowers you to keep operations up, even during setbacks.

Reputation management

Data is crucial for smooth business operations, which is why data availability is directly proportional to a company's reputation.

A disaster recovery plan prevents reputational damage by guaranteeing that customers always have the necessary data. No halt in business operations means your customers and stakeholders have faith in you. 

Financial protection

A disaster recovery plan can prevent financial loss from data loss, high downtime, productivity disruptions, loss of customer trust, and reputation damage. Invest in a tailored disaster recovery plan for long-term financial security.

Creating a comprehensive disaster recovery plan helps businesses face unforeseen challenges.

Begin by conducting a thorough risk assessment to understand potential threats and then prioritize systems from most to least. With this information, implement a suitable backup plan for your entire IT infrastructure.

Clearly communicate expectations for roles and responsibilities to everyone involved in setting up and maintaining the disaster recovery plan. Finally, we recommend testing and updating it regularly to align with any changes to the business environment.

Let's break down each key component involved in building an effective disaster recovery plan.

Assessing the risks 

A disaster recovery plan starts with identifying potential external and internal risks. 

  • Internal risks , such as human errors, hardware failure, or software glitches
  • External risks , such as malware attacks and natural disasters

Businesses need to create a list of possible pitfalls based on likelihood and severity. This roster identifies the impact that each risk poses so you and your team can moderate their negative effects.

Establishing recovery objectives 

To establish recovery objectives, you have to understand two key factors.

Firstly, you need to assess the importance of each workload or application in your environment. The level can vary from high to medium to low. Secondly, based on this assessment, set the recovery time and point objectives ( RPO and RTO ) that play a crucial role in minimizing data loss and ensuring swift business continuity.

RPO is the place from which you want to restore the data, which means you have to define your acceptable data loss. RTO is how quickly you want a system or application to get up and running again after a disaster.

Within the disaster recovery plan framework, it’s crucial to align recovery objectives with the priority level of workloads. This lets businesses minimize the impact of data loss incidents and perform a timely recovery.

Implementing a backup solution 

Backup is the process of copying data and keeping it in a storage medium within the same or different location. You can restore data from the backup whenever needed.

A backup plan forms the backbone of a disaster recovery plan that protects business-critical data against loss and enables you to resume business operations swiftly.

How to choose the right backup solution 

The key factors listed below can help you make an informed decision in choosing the right backup solution that aligns seamlessly with your disaster recovery plan. 

  • Diverse workload support: Most IT environments comprise diverse workloads such as virtual machines (VMs), servers, endpoints, cloud VMs, and SaaS applications. Hence, ensure that your solution offers backup support for all workloads in your environment with centralized management and reporting capabilities. 
  • Backup approach: There are multiple backup approaches, such as on-premise, remote, hybrid, and direct-to-cloud backup. Make sure the backup solution supports the approach your organization prefers.
  • Lowest RPO and RTO: Choose a backup solution that offers near-zero recovery objectives.
  • Flexible storage and scalability: Backup solutions have to contribute to versatile storage options, like NAS and SAN, or cloud storage, like AWS, Azure, and Google. As your business grows, the backup solution should scale up as you need.
  • Data retention and compliance: You should be able to retain data as long as you need, especially for compliance with local regulations.
  • Cost: One of the important decision factors is budget. Make sure you can afford the solution. It’s also smart to get flexible licensing options to cater to evolving business needs.

Disaster recovery strategies 

In addition to backup, there are a few other technologies and processes to consider implementing as a part of the disaster recovery strategy.

These predefined methods allow businesses to respond to any disaster immediately and resume operations quickly.

Virtual machine (VM) replication 

VM replication creates exact copies of VMs and hosts them on another site.

The changes on the source VMs can be replicated in real time or periodically. The replica machine remains turned off at your secondary site. You can shift the operations when needed.

  • Failover : If a disaster strikes in your primary site or if a VM fails, you can immediately perform failover, which turns on the replica VM and switches all your operations to a secondary site.  You can also permanently finalize the failover and use the replica VM as your primary VM.
  • Failback : In case you want to restore your source VM with all the changes made during the failover event, you can perform failback and resume your production operations from the primary site itself.

Offsite disaster recovery 

Offsite disaster recovery is the process of making offsite copies of backups to your data center in a different location. This means you have a redundant copy of your data in a remote location to verify additional data protection via geographical separation.

Even if your primary site experiences a disaster, your offsite copy can restore data so you can get back to work. Configure near-zero recovery objectives for offsite backups to guarantee swift recovery and minimal data loss. Offsite copies also allow you to rebuild your entire primary site.

Cloud disaster recovery 

Cloud-based disaster recovery uses cloud storage to recover from disruptive events. One of the modern approaches to disaster recovery,

Cloud disaster recovery copies your data and stores it in the cloud. It’s highly scalable and provides access to your data from anywhere at any time, so you can restore data from the cloud instantly, even if your entire local site is compromised.

Backup vs. disaster recovery  

Both backup and disaster recovery are important for effective data protection, restoring IT systems, and resuming business operations. 

Testing your disaster recovery plan 

Regularly test your disaster recovery plan to make sure it stays effective. This is the best way to validate the existing approach and resolve any potential gaps before an actual catastrophe happens.

The first step is documenting and communicating the disaster recovery plan to everyone involved.

The entire plan, including each individual's roles and responsibilities, should be discussed thoroughly. If an unforeseen incident occurs, your team must be prepared to execute the necessary steps to recover from it.

The next step is functional testing, which performs specific functions such as data recovery and failover. This is to ascertain whether you can still carry out critical functions and to ensure that you meet your recovery objectives.

You can do simulation testing to test out disaster scenarios and observe how your plan performs under these conditions.  

Parallel testing is also available. This technique switches both primary and backup systems to see if the backups can work seamlessly. 

Finally, you can go for full-scale testing to see if your disaster recovery plan works. Every step in your disaster recovery plan is evaluated to determine whether it can be used as a full replacement if your primary site fails.

Regularly update the disaster recovery plan so it remains aligned with the changing business environment.

Businesses can build a resilient plan by adhering to the best practices that help you tackle any unforeseen data loss incidents with confidence. 

  • Document and training: Make sure the disaster recovery document is current. Conduct awareness programs for employees to inform them about the plan and their roles and responsibilities.
  • Aim for near-zero recovery time and point objectives: Define proper recovery objectives for your workloads based on their importance. For highly critical workloads, establish continuous or close-to-continuous data protection starting every 5 to 15 minutes.
  • Set up a comprehensive local backup: Implement a backup solution for all critical workloads in your environment to protect them against data loss.
  • Use offsite storage: If you have a remote data center, set up an offsite copy or replicate VMs for it. This allows you to maintain a separate data copy and recover from it when needed.
  • Explore cloud-based solutions: Utilize cloud solutions for backup or offsite copy as they offer scalability, geographic redundancy, and universal accessibility.
  • Automate: Incorporate automation for processes like recovery, failover, and backup verification. This ensures swift recovery and verifies data consistency.
  • Follow security and compliance rules: Ensure the security measures are built into the disaster recovery plan. Include encryption and ransomware protection, and confirm compliance with relevant regulations.
  • Test all the time: Conduct regular testing to determine the continued effectiveness of your plan.
  • Establish post-incident evaluation: Update the disaster recovery plan for enhanced resilience based on the results of tests or actual disaster incidents. 

Differences between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan

Disaster recovery plans and business continuity plans (BCP) are both essential to your organization's resilience.

A disaster recovery plan focuses primarily on IT-related recovery, while BCP is a comprehensive strategy that covers all aspects of continuity during and after disruptions. It’s important to make sure the two plans work together seamlessly.  

Let's compare disaster recovery plan and BCP based on some of their key aspects:

Preparing your business for disaster recovery

A proactive and well-implemented disaster relief plan continues to be an invaluable asset that contributes to your company’s survival and sets you up to thrive after any kind of catastrophe as technology and its risks evolve.

Create an effective disaster recovery plan for your IT infrastructure and give yourself and your team the peace of mind that comes from complete data protection, risk mitigation, system restoration, and business continuity during unforeseen disruptions.

Crafting a discovery recovery plan? Enhance your data security arsenal with the best practices to boost data security and avoid a breach.

Edited by Aisha West

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Bhavani is a part of the Product Success team at Vembu Technologies . With a primary focus on enhancing user experience, she strives to optimize the customer journey and foster overall product success. She constantly seeks new ways to improve user experience across Vembu's products.

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How to ensure business continuity in the face of internet disruptions.

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Ryan is the President and Chief Operations Officer of GeoLinks , a leading Internet and Digital Voice Provider.

Businesses that want to remain competitive need to proactively plan for unforeseen circumstances that could potentially hinder business continuity, such as internet disruptions. When your internet connection goes down, it not only disrupts your communication channels internally but also cuts you off from vital external stakeholders such as suppliers, customers, distributors and sales partners. Additionally, the reliance on cloud applications and the potential loss of revenue further highlights the urgency for businesses to prioritize measures that ensure uninterrupted operations in the face of internet disruptions.

Throughout my career in telecommunications, I've observed that strategic technology investments are vital to guarantee seamless business operations. Rather than adopting a passive stance, business leaders should actively seek out and invest in innovative strategies and solutions that safeguard business continuity.

Below are three key things businesses should consider to ensure business continuity in 2024.

1. Network Redundancy

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the necessity for flexible working options and forced many businesses to transition into remote models. Even after the pandemic, a significant percentage of companies retain a remote work option. According to Buffer, 64% of companies were fully remote in 2023 and this trend will likely continue, with a prediction that 32.6 million Americans will work remotely by 2025. Network redundancy, the process of data flowing seamlessly when a primary network component or link fails, becomes critical as businesses rely heavily on consistent and stable internet connectivity for both in-office and remote work setups, making it important to maintain business continuity.

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Having internet failover—a backup internet connection that creates redundancy—in place helps safeguard your business from the vulnerabilities of single-connection failure. Technologies like software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) can easily establish and manage internet failover protection for a single-branch or multi-branch operation. At GeoLinks, for example, we maintain multiple internet paths and diverse connectivity options to guarantee 100% uptime for our business clients and team.

Business leaders should diversify technological investments, including a dedicated fixed wireless circuit, a fiber connection, a 5G hotspot, or other alternatives to mitigate risks and avoid dependency on a single solution.

2. Disaster Recovery Plan

In light of the recent outage that left businesses in south Dallas without internet, the importance of having a disaster recovery plan for internet disruptions becomes even more evident. According to a LogicMonitor study, 96% of organizations experience an outage in a 3-year period, while 95% experienced at least one brownout, defined as "an occasion when less electric power than usual is supplied to an area."

Given that internet connectivity is critical for modern businesses, a well-structured disaster recovery plan is crucial for minimizing the impact on business continuity during unforeseen events, such as bad weather, a cyberattack or system failures. This plan should outline how to quickly restore internet connectivity and minimize the impact of internet disruptions.

To develop an effective plan, businesses should start by conducting a thorough assessment of their current network infrastructure. Identifying potential vulnerabilities and single points of failure is key to shoring up defenses against unexpected outages. Gathering feedback from managers and employees is equally important, as their insights can reveal overlooked aspects and areas that may not have been fully addressed in the initial planning stages.

Integrating diverse technologies, like long-term evolution (LTE), can help improve a disaster recovery plan. LTE is a high-speed wireless communication standard that quickly fills the gap when the primary connection is disrupted. Well-designed networks utilize diverse technologies. Leveraging these technological resources helps to maintain productivity, guarantee smooth communication with stakeholders and safeguard revenue streams.

3. Unified Communications

As technology continues to evolve, the importance of adapting and incorporating these advancements for business continuity increases. Unified communications (UC), which integrates different communication tools into a single system, helps with the modern demand for on-the-go business connectivity.

One key element of unified communications is the incorporation of digital voice technologies. Such technologies allow businesses to make and receive calls via high-speed broadband internet connections, replacing the need for traditional phone lines. Consequently, businesses can maintain seamless communication regardless of location.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be further leveraged for business continuity, with a 2022 Deloitte survey revealing that 76% of respondents plan to increase investments in AI to gain more operational benefits. In terms of business continuity, AI enables automated customer service outside regular business hours. Incorporating tools like digital voice and AI ensures businesses can operate more smoothly and maintain continuity.

Maintaining business continuity requires planning and investment.

As business leaders, it’s important to recognize that no company is exempt from unexpected disruptions. By investing in network redundancy, establishing disaster recovery plans and embracing technology advancements like UC and AI, businesses can optimize operational efficiency, revenue and long-term success.

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Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Strategies

As the head of IT operations for a rapidly expanding e-commerce startup, I'm tasked with ensuring our systems are resilient and prepared for any unforeseen challenges. As we prioritize our business continuity and disaster recovery efforts, I'm keen to gather insights from the community: How frequently do you review and update your business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan? When it comes to storing backups, where do you prefer to store them, and how do you guarantee data integrity and accessibility? What level of downtime for critical processes do you consider acceptable before it translates into unacceptable financial or reputational damage (RTO)? In the event of an outage, what level of data loss is deemed acceptable (RPO)? Could you share your approach to replication, particularly in terms of continuous data copying to a secondary location for expedited recovery?

User: Timetraveler Timetraveler

Popular Topics in Disaster Recovery Planning

Author Taras Schwed

Brand Representative for Object First

Hi, and welcome to the Community!

As a part-time IT consultant, I am dealing with a variety of businesses with entirely different strategies, which is why I will answer the questions based on a company with the most strict strategies out of my entire portfolio.

  • How frequently do you review and update your business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan? 

A quarterly meeting with the IT team and top management is conducted to make sure all the processes regarding business continuity and DR are aligned.

  • When it comes to storing backups, where do you prefer to store them, and how do you guarantee data integrity and accessibility? 

On-premises (ransomware-protected, immutable, zero-trust), off-site (same as on-prem but different offices or ISP colocation), and public cloud are probably what everyone does nowadays. The retention period may vary but the number of copies is an absolute minimum I would say. Automated recovery check jobs and random manual checks.

  • What level of downtime for critical processes do you consider acceptable before it translates into unacceptable financial or reputational damage (RTO)? 

5 minutes for critical processes (retail) and 60 minutes for everything else.

  • In the event of an outage, what level of data loss is deemed acceptable (RPO)? 

1 hour for critical data (finances, customer data) and 1 day for everything else.

  • Could you share your approach to replication, particularly in terms of continuous data copying to a secondary location for expedited recovery?

Everything virtualized, hyper-converged approach within a single location (several hosts, clustering, real-time VM storage replication using Starwind, Storage Spaces Direct, or VMware vSAN depending on hypervisor, hardware, and requirements) plus offsite replication.

Author Adrian Yong

spicehead-885kw wrote: As the head of IT operations for a rapidly expanding e-commerce startup, I'm tasked with ensuring our systems are resilient and prepared for any unforeseen challenges. As we prioritize our business continuity and disaster recovery efforts, I'm keen to gather insights from the community: How frequently do you review and update your business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan? When it comes to storing backups, where do you prefer to store them, and how do you guarantee data integrity and accessibility? What level of downtime for critical processes do you consider acceptable before it translates into unacceptable financial or reputational damage (RTO)? In the event of an outage, what level of data loss is deemed acceptable (RPO)? Could you share your approach to replication, particularly in terms of continuous data copying to a secondary location for expedited recovery?

As a CIO and IT manager (we have 31 subsidiaries), I would say it really depends on the scale of your ecommerce startup and how far you need to scale to....

I have several org that are 100% on the cloud while some are like 70% on the cloud - leverage stateless SAAS offerings like AWS elastic beanstalk with auto-scaling and multi-Availability zone so that you literally can have 110% up time - leverage DB like AWS Aroura that can have up to 6 Availability zones so that DB and applications are almost never down & you do not have to worry about DB replication. AWS also provides Aroura backup services - Leverage on AWS EC2 instances for multi-AZ and autoscaling also

If you are managing most of your servers on-prem....then you really need to know what options for your secondary site, for some can be a 2nd building nearby whereas some would use co-location data centers instead of having server rooms. But the common factor is that all servers need to be VMs on either Hyper-v or VMware as these have the most supporting backup & replication software unless you are using some software defined storage that have replication built in. I would not mention about software defined hypervisors with HA & FT features as that can be a little overwhelming and overpriced. Commonly use Veeam Backup & replication 12.x to - backup VMs (hyper-v or VMware) using Veeam Reverse Incremental backup - use Veeam Backup Copy to copy Backup Data sets from NAS in one location to 2nd - use Veeam Backup & Replication to Replicate VMs using Backup data sets already residing on remote site NAS to remote site hosts * If you have Veeam VUL licenses or the older Veeam Enterprise licenses, you can use surebackup to test backup data sets and/or surereplica to test the replica https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/recovery_verification_surereplica.html?ver=120 Opens a new window

If you need 110% up time, then you will need to look at - Network Load Balancing for web servers  - OS clustering for application servers - DB clustering for databases - at least 2 DCs per network - 2 or more file servers with FRS But these would needed to be supported with - redundant network switches - redundant routers (in HA mode) - UPS and/or power generators - redundant cooling systems - multiple hosts (so the above VMs can sit on different physical servers) - redundant Internet connection with security appliances * now you maybe able to see why AWS and/or SAAS may look like a more feasible option ?

I give simple example of having on-prem Exchange Server and you need it to be having 110% up time.....you need to have redundant setups in case anything within the building may fail. Then you may need to duplicate this setup (or at least 1/2) to the DR or secondary site. But if you have email on SAAS offerings like Exchange Online or G-suite, if they do go down, likely it is a global issue or at least a continental issue & all you have to pay is like $10 or $15 per user per month. The same idea can be applied to your web servers, payment gateways, application servers, ERP solution, Finance solutions, DB, etc

Author Martin Hepworth

Also remember BCP isnt an IT issue, this is a business problem

loss of assets and how you react to them and at what point loosing a building/warehouse etc becomes an issue is for the business to plan

Sure theres a n IT componment but its not everything.

Author F. E.

What most people oversee is the fact that there is no real "ransomware proof" solution or strategy available.

AFAIK all available solutions like immutable backup storage or more generation backups on different media all only reduce the impact, but are no solutions for a perfect protection for a serious attack.

All the backup manufactures will go up the fences for a statement like this. Let me explain what I mean.

The serious attack will be done in at least three or four steps. First, the attacker will try to penetrate your defences silently. For example, a malicious mail with some link that doesn't seem to do anything. In fact, it silently installs some Trojan or backdoor to your systems. If this is successful, it will do anything to remain undetected and starts collecting intel in your systems to get higher privileges and so on. After a while - let's say 6 months - the actual attack begins.

Then the attacker will actually use the intel collected and starts doing his ransomware stuff and probably will install another few backdoors with the newly gained higher privileges. 

Consider what this procedure means to your backups. If the attacker remains undetected until he starts his damaging work, you'll have no backups left which are not infected or not so old that the data in it is pretty useless. And it doesn't matter if they are stored on immutable storage or not - immutable only protects against the alteration of the backup files themselves, and not against what's inside your backups.

So what kind of defence will help beforehand? Not much really - since over 80% of successful attacks start with some kind of user action (clicking the famous link) it's essential to train your users - they are your primary defence line. Every cent invested in this field is a plus in the future. Get yourself a good hardware firewall solution with all the detection options your preferred manufacturer has to offer. This is your second line of defence, so don't be stingy here and invest some money. If it's not included in your firewalls, get some antivirus solution for your endpoints. This could be Microsoft Defender - if it's configured correctly by someone who knows what he is doing. This is the last line of defence - if something slips through everything above, pray that Billy watches over you. Last but not least - get yourself a cyber insurance - a good one. If everything above fails, and you got hacked, you will need some real pros to find the infections in your backups, neutralize them and get your data back in a reasonable amount of time. And since there aren't so many of those people left, who haven't changed sides, they are expensive - really expensive. Good ones start at 10k a day, and you will need a team of them. If you're lucky they'll need a week to fix everything - if it's more complicated it could be 2 or 3 weeks. Do the maths for your own.

So my thinking is, that if you want to be protected against ransomware, you foremost need to empower your users and invest in good hardware and insurance.

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IMAGES

  1. Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery

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  2. What Is BCDR? Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Guide (2024)

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  5. Why You Can't Ignore Having a Disaster Recovery Plan

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  6. PPT

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COMMENTS

  1. What is BCDR? Business continuity and disaster recovery guide

    Business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) are closely related practices that support an organization's ability to remain operational after an adverse event. Resiliency has become the watchword for organizations facing an array of threats, from natural disasters to the latest round of cyber attacks.

  2. Business continuity vs. disaster recovery: Which plan is right ...

    Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are risk management strategies that businesses rely on to prepare for unexpected incidents. While the terms are closely related, there are some key differences worth considering when choosing which is right for you:

  3. What is business continuity and why is it important?

    Business continuity and disaster recovery guide Which also includes: Business resilience vs. business continuity: Key differences Preparing an annual schedule of business continuity activities Free business impact analysis (BIA) template with instructions Why is business continuity important?

  4. What Is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), and How Does It Work?

    Business continuity plans (BCPs) are prevention and recovery systems for potential threats, such as natural disasters or cyber-attacks. BCP is designed to protect personnel and assets and...

  5. What is business continuity disaster recovery?

    Business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) refers to a process that helps organizations return to normal business operations in the event of a disaster. While the terms business continuity and disaster recovery are closely related, they describe two subtly different approaches to crisis management that businesses can take.

  6. What is business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR)?

    SOLUTIONS Cybersecurity Management Everything you need to protect your clients' most critical business assets Address the growing frequency, type, and severity of cyber threats against SMB endpoints Centralize threat visibility and analysis, backed by cutting-edge threat intelligence Risk Assessment & Vulnerability Management

  7. What is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?

    Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity planning are often linked, but they are different. A DR plan is reactive, as it details how an organization recovers after a business disruption. A business continuity plan is a proactive approach that describes how an organization can maintain business operations during an emergency.

  8. What is BCDR? Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Explained

    Resource Planning - Identifying resources (hardware systems, software, alternative office space and other items to be used during a crisis) as well as the key staff, and the roles they must play in the event of a disaster. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity planning and involves getting IT systems up and running following a ...

  9. Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Planning (BCP & DRP)

    In an IT context, business continuity is the capability of your enterprise to stay online and deliver products and services during disruptive events, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks and communication failures. The core of this concept is the business continuity plan — a defined strategy that includes every facet of your organization ...

  10. Business continuity and disaster recovery planning: The basics

    Here are the basics of a state-of-the-art disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) plan for 2021 and beyond. (Without getting too hung up on definitions, let's say that disaster recovery is ...

  11. Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery Explained

    For starters, the business continuity plan is typically focused on organization-wide strategic planning. A disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, details how an organization can continue to run specifically during or after a disaster. A BCP broadly covers every necessary detail, including the resources, processes, IT systems, and ...

  12. What is BCDR: Business Continuity Planning & Why is it Important?

    BCDR or Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery is a set of practices that bring together people, technology and process used to help an organization continue or recover business operations in a disaster. It is a broad term that combines the roles and functions of IT and business in the aftermath of a disaster.

  13. What Is Business Continuity?

    A business continuity plan (BCP) might contain several disaster recovery plans, for example. What is a business continuity strategy? A business continuity strategy is a summary of the mitigation, crisis, and recovery plans to be implemented after a disruption to resume normal operations.

  14. What Is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)

    Business continuity is the list of procedures that allows a company to resume its mission-critical operations as quickly as possible following a disruptive event. It is a comprehensive strategy that combines all available resources while specifying individual and organizational responsibilities.

  15. Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery: 5 Key Differences

    Disaster recovery refers to the plans a business puts into place for responding to a catastrophic event, such as a natural disaster, fire, act of terror, active shooter or cybercrime. Disaster recovery involves the measures a business takes to respond to an event and return to safe, normal operation as quickly as possible.

  16. BCDR: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

    According to Business Continuity Institute (BCI) and Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ), business continuity is defined as "the strategic and tactical capability of the organization to plan for and respond to incidents and business disruptions in order to continue business operations at an acceptable predefined level."

  17. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

    Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR or BC/DR) is a set of processes and techniques used to help an organization recover from a disaster and continue or resume routine business operations. It is a broad term that combines the roles and functions of IT and business in the aftermath of a disaster. Advertisements

  18. Disaster recovery plan vs. business continuity plan: Is there a

    Disaster recovery and business continuity are two terms often used interchangeably ' but doing so risks missing some of the key differences between the two strategies. To debunk the disaster recovery plan vs. business continuity plan debate, we look at: What each means; Where the two are similar; How they differ; Why they are often confused

  19. Creating an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan for Business Continuity

    A disaster recovery plan proactively prepares businesses for different kinds of disaster situations by identifying potential risks and developing mitigation techniques. Business continuity. A disaster recovery plan protects business continuity after data loss, enabling organizations to bring back critical IT systems, applications, and data online.

  20. What is a Business Continuity Policy?

    The goal of a business continuity policy is to document what is needed keep an organization running on ordinary business days as well as times of emergency. When the policy is well-defined and clearly adhered to, the company can set realistic expectations for business continuity and disaster recovery ( BC/DR) processes.

  21. PDF Glossary of Business Continuity Terms

    Activity A process or set of processes undertaken by an organization (or on its behalf) that produces or supports one or more products and services. ISO 22301:2012 This may also be called a Business Activity. Alert Notification that a potential disruption is imminent or has occurred. DRJ BCI Usually includes a directive to act or standby.

  22. Key Considerations for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

    Specifically, during business continuity discussions, details around recovery times of applications/systems; awareness and education through tabletop exercises or drills; and business impact analyses (BIA) are refined. A useful but also challenging tool in business continuity planning is consideration of different scenarios.

  23. How To Ensure Business Continuity In The Face Of Internet ...

    Below are three key things businesses should consider to ensure business continuity in 2024. 1. Network Redundancy. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the necessity for flexible working options and ...

  24. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Strategies

    Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Strategies. As the head of IT operations for a rapidly expanding e-commerce startup, I'm tasked with ensuring our systems are resilient and prepared for any unforeseen challenges. As we prioritize our business continuity and disaster recovery efforts, I'm keen to gather insights from the community:

  25. What is a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) and How Do You Write One?

    A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a documented, structured approach that describes how an organization can quickly resume work after an unplanned incident. A DRP is an essential part of a business continuity plan ( BCP ). It is applied to the aspects of an organization that depend on a functioning information technology (IT) infrastructure.

  26. Federal Register :: General Services Administration Acquisition

    Recovery may begin while response is still occurring. Response means actions taken during a disaster, or in its aftermath, in order to save lives, protect property and the environment, and meet basic human needs. Response also includes the execution of emergency plans and actions to enable recovery from a disaster.