What is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

A Business Continuity plan helps an organization recover from disaster and ensures the continuity of operations

Business Continuity (BC)

The Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ) and Business Continuity Institute (BCI), defines business continuity 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.” A business continuity plan identifies all the actions and predetermined responsibilities that must be taken in case of a disaster. It includes all aspects of the organization: its employees, IT infrastructure, office buildings, communication channels, partners, etc. The goal is to define how the organization can maintain critical business operations during and after a disaster.

Disaster Recovery (DR)

Disaster Recovery is part of the business continuity plan. It focuses on the information and technology systems that support business operations. It includes the process, policies and procedures required to prepare for recovery or to keep up the technology infrastructure, systems and applications which are vital to an organization after a disaster or outage.

When does your company need a Business Continuity plan?

A strong disaster recovery IT plan allows companies to prevent data loss, service interruptions and application downtime

A recent survey shows that more than 90 percent of companies without a disaster recovery plan and which suffer a major disaster are out of business within 12 months. In case of a large-scale disaster, all the organization’s operations can be shut down with a risk of data loss and real damages for the business reputation.

A Business Continuity plan is like an IT insurance policy for any company. Also, being able to tackle and prevent any disaster can have a positive impact on your customers and business partners. It shows your company is highly reliable because it is well-prepared in case of any disaster or outage.

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What are the advantages of a Business Continuity plan for your company?

A Business Continuity plan will minimize the effects of a crisis on your business operations

Our teams at IT BOTS will help your company fortify its Business Continuity plan around 5 goals:

Assess the present condition of the organization

The plan needs to identify possible threats and set priorities depending on the current state of the organization. It has to be updated when new changes to the functioning of the organization are provided.

Find flaws and provide solutions

A well-built plan needs to identify any gap that could potentially impact business operations and jeopardize the implementation of the BCDR strategy. A routine assessment will help identify potential risks and weaknesses.

Review and test the plan

Reviewing the BCDR plan on a yearly basis will ensure that it remains efficient and up to date for rapid business recovery. Depending on the IT environment and the resources available, we may use one or several testing methods for testing and simulations.

Identify data storage locations

Knowing where business data and assets are stored is crucial. This identification will help disaster recovery teams launch the recovery procedure even if the designated IT teams are not available.

Communication and responsibilities across the teams

Another crucial aspect of a BCDR plan is to identify the key roles of each stakeholder and member of personnel who can be reached during an emergency. This documentation must be accessible to all employees and should be updated regularly.

Tools we use for business continuity

With IT BOTS, your organization can rely on the newest technologies to simplify and accelerate processes of a robust business continuity plan

In a research report from the Ponemon Institute on data center outages, it has been found that each minute of downtime can cost an astounding $9,000. This number covers the cost of restoring mission-critical data and equipment, the impact of missed employee productivity, and the legal and regulatory consequences of a disaster.

With IT BOTS, your organization can have access to smarter and more integrated disaster recovery solutions. The use of cloud or hybrid environment solutions will help your business save money and reduce the damage caused by an outage or disaster.

The use of complex recovery tools will help you secure data, schedule backups, and establish company-wide policies. This is a list of the recovery tools we specialize in:

Bareos – Microsoft Azure Backup

AWS Backup

Bacula

Backblaze Business Backup

Veeam Enterprise