Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)
BCDR
Just like all businesses need an insurance policy, they also need a business continuity and disaster recovery plan.
If there’s a power outage, a natural disaster, a supply chain issue or a cyber hack, you need a contingency plan in place to prevent any single point of failure from happening.
What is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?
A business continuity plan involves creating a process on how your business will prevent any unexpected disaster-like situations from affecting your business operations. It will mitigate risks of natural disasters, prevent communications failures, minimises the risk of cyber attacks, and avoid other disruptions.
It’s your insurance plan for survival
As we all saw in the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a sudden need for almost all office staff to work from home with a day’s notice. Those businesses that did not plan for how this would affect their normal operations and their clients struggled. Hopefully, your business continuity plan will never be used. But you need it in your reserves to ensure the business will still function should the worst happen. Your business should always plan a response to disaster-like situations before they happen.
A business continuity plan is typically focused on people, processes and locations, while disaster recovery tends to focus more on IT.
Assessment
Planning
Testing
Compliance
What is disaster recovery?
Should a disruption affect your business, disaster recovery services involves planning a set of policies, IT procedures and tools available to protect your organisation from negative side effects.
A disaster recovery strategy will enable you to quickly resume your business-critical operations after a disruption.
Key features of a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)
A typical disaster recovery plan will take a lengthy amount of time to complete. You need to track all critical operations, contact information for each member of staff, and key procedures which you need to go through with in the event of a disruption or emergency.
You should also list all possible scenarios which could affect your enterprise, and the solution which you would implement. Some key features include, but are not limited to:
- Communication plan
- Personnel responsibilities – and back up employees
- Hardware and software inventory
- Important non-IT assets
- Data security and data backups
- Data importance by tier
- A full asset inventory
- Supply chain and client communication
- Backup worksite – this includes working from home
- Testing your plan regularly by stimulating possible outcomes
Business impact analysis
Business impact analysis involves prioritising and identifying your time-sensitive activities in the event of a disruption. It determines how critical each business activity is, and which requirements are most important to minimise business disruption.
When a business impact analysis is done well, it will give you a much clearer picture of how critical each business operation is.
Your business continuity partner
At Conosco, we can help with your current business challenges to ensure that your business continuity and disaster recovery plan is sound. We’re Microsoft Gold and RingCentral partners, both of which are world-leaders in business technology and communication solutions. Our business continuity and disaster recovery services can help you with:
- Business Continuity Planning (BCP)
- Safeguarding people, customers and assets
- Enabling communication and collaboration
- Round the clock support team
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