by meagancleary
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Businesses face an array of potential disruptions ranging from cyberattacks and technological failures to natural disasters and pandemics. Such incidents can severely impact business operations, reputation, and revenue. Therefore, having a comprehensive Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan is not just advisable; it’s essential. This guide outlines the steps to create a resilient BCDR plan, ensuring your business can weather any storm. We also provide you with a free IT Disaster Recovery Checklist to help you get started with your planning.
Understanding Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) are closely related practices. Both types of planning support an organization’s ability to remain operational after an adverse event. The main difference between the two is focus and scope.
BC is a more holistic approach that includes planning for keeping all aspects of a business functioning in the midst of disruptive events, beyond just IT systems. DR is a subset of BC that focuses specifically on the IT infrastructure and operations. A good DR plan details how to recover data, applications, and hardware that are critical to business operations following a disaster.
Disaster recovery planning encompasses the policies, tools and procedures to enable recovery of data following a catastrophic event. While business continuity planning (BCP) is concerned with keeping all aspects of a business functioning regardless of potential disruptive events. As such, a business continuity plan is a more comprehensive organizational strategy that includes the DRP in addition to threat prevention, detection, recovery, and resumption of operations should a data breach or other disaster event occur.
In summary, the main differences between business continuity and disaster recovery are:
- Business Continuity involves maintaining business functions or quickly resuming them in the event of a major disruption.
- Disaster Recovery focuses on restoring IT infrastructure and operations after a crisis.
Both types of disaster planning are vital to a comprehensive strategy that safeguards your business’ digital assets and reputation.
Steps to take when developing a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan
These are the steps to take when creating your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan.
Step 1: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
Start with a Business Impact Analysis to identify your critical business functions, and the resources they require. Then assess the potential impact of disruptions to these functions and estimate the financial and operational losses a business might incur.
The process includes defining recovery priorities and objectives, such as recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), that guide the development of business continuity and disaster recovery strategies tailored to safeguard key business assets and ensure a swift recovery.
What is RTO and RPO?
RTO
Recovering from a disaster after being notified of a business disruption is known as the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). There should be a clear RTO specified for every application group in a trustworthy disaster recovery plan. If your company cannot withstand an hour of downtime without losing customers to competitors or incurring penalty fees due to service-level agreements, and it is critical that it be operational before the hour has passed, then, your RTO is one hour.
RPO
RPO or Recovery Point Objective is the window of time in which data loss is tolerable. If you only backup your data at night and your company can only tolerate data loss for four hours, then an afternoon disaster would result in a catastrophic loss of vital information. In this case, your RPO would be four hours.
A company’s RTO and RPO will affect its DR strategy as well as associated expenses. While a simple file-level backup system might be sufficient for some applications, your mission-critical applications need a DR solution with continuous data replication and rapid recovery to keep your business running in order to achieve minimal RPOs and RTOs.
Step 2: Risk Assessment
Conduct a thorough risk assessment to understand the various threats your business faces, from natural disasters to cyber threats. Assess the likelihood of each risk and its potential impact on your operations. This step is crucial for developing effective mitigation strategies.
Examples of risks to assess include:
- Natural Disasters and Climate Risks: These include events such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and pandemics. Natural disasters can cause significant physical damage to infrastructure and disrupt normal business operations.
- Technical Risks: This category covers risks related to technology and systems, such as hardware failure, software bugs, data corruption, and loss of internet service. It also includes cybersecurity threats like malware, ransomware, data breaches, and denial of service (DoS) attacks.
- Human-Made Disasters: These are events caused by human actions, whether intentional or accidental. Examples include sabotage, terrorism, industrial accidents, fire, and power outages. Human error, such as accidental data deletion or system misconfiguration, also falls under this category.
- Supply Chain Disruptions: This involves risks associated with the failure of suppliers or 3rd party vendors, which can impact the availability of critical materials or services necessary for business operations.
- Legal and Regulatory Risks: Changes in laws or regulations, non-compliance issues, and legal disputes can disrupt business operations and lead to financial losses.
- Reputational Risks: Events that damage an organization’s reputation, such as negative publicity or social media backlash, can have a lasting impact on customer trust and business viability.
- Economic Risks: These include factors like market volatility, economic downturns, changes in consumer demand, and financial instability, which can adversely affect a company’s operations.
- Geopolitical Risks: Political instability, terrorism, war, and sanctions can disrupt business operations, especially for companies operating internationally.
Assess these risks to identify potential threats, and evaluate the likelihood and potential impact on the organization, prioritizing each based on their severity. This process helps you develop strategies to mitigate risks, and ensures you are prepared to respond and effectively recover from any type of disruptive event.
Step 3: Strategy Development
With your business impact analysis and risk assessment in hand, your next step is to develop a strategy to maintain operations during disruptions. This step includes identifying alternative business processes, IT recovery solutions, and also the type of communication plans with stakeholders.
Step 4: Plan Development
With the strategy defined, you can now compile your findings and decisions into a detailed BCDR plan. This document should include:
- Roles and Responsibilities: Assign a dedicated team with clear roles and responsibilities for disaster response and recovery.
- Emergency Contact Information: Include contact details for key personnel and external partners like suppliers and emergency services.
- Detailed Recovery Procedures: Outline step-by-step recovery procedures for each critical business function identified in your BIA.
- Communication Plans: Develop protocols for internal and external communication during a disruption.
- IT Recovery Strategies: Document the steps to restore your IT systems, including data backups, server redundancies, and software reinstallation procedures.
Step 5: Business Continuity and Disaster Plan Testing and Training
A BCDR plan is only as good as its execution. Regularly test your plan through drills and simulations to identify any weaknesses. Additionally, train your employees on their roles during a disaster, ensuring everyone knows what to do when disaster strikes.
Step 6: Plan Maintenance
Disaster recovery and business continuity are not set-and-forget tasks. Regularly review and update your plan to reflect changes in your business operations, technology, and the external environment. This ensures your plan remains effective over time.
Final Thoughts
Creating a comprehensive Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan is a significant but essential undertaking that can mean the difference between a swift recovery and prolonged disruption. By following these steps, you can ensure your business is prepared to face and overcome any disaster.
Creating and maintaining a BCDR plan is a dynamic process that keeps your business resilient in the face of unforeseen events. By investing time and resources into this critical area, you can safeguard your operations, protect your employees, and ensure the long-term success of your enterprise.
To help get your planning started, download the IT Disaster Recovery Checklist here.
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