What is BCDR: Business Continuity Planning & Why is it Important?
In any small improvement to your business, ensuring that your company maximises uptime and streamline efficiency is a constant battle. However some companies don’t plan for what happens in a total shutdown from faults such as power cuts, cyber attacks, or natural disasters. In fact, roughly 40 to 60 percent of small businesses that experience a total shutdown of operations never reopen, according to the US Federal Emergency Management Agency.
What is BCDR? (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery)
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.
BCDR enables organizations to adapt to and bounce back from disruptions while maintaining continuous business operations.
What Is Business Continuity?
Business continuity is the strategy and planning process that allows an organization to respond with minimal disruption to business operations when a disaster or disruption occurs. Business continuity planning is designed to ensure that the company, its employees, and its customers are able to continue to do business with minimal disruption.
To ensure that your business can continue to operate you need to create, deploy, and regularly test a Business Continuity Plan.
What Is a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan is a business process, which includes a step-by-step plan to ensure businesses are able to continue operating in the event of a disaster or if a workplace becomes inaccessible.
Although business continuity plans need to be detailed enough to ensure that you can keep your business running smoothly, it’s important to keep your plan resilient enough to work in multiple situations.
Why do businesses need a business continuity plan?
Businesses face all types of threats that have the potential to disrupt operations or to take it offline completely. There are steps you can take to protect your business and this is where a tested business continuity plan can be essential.
Common causes of business downtime
- Human Error
- Malicious Sabotage
- Cyber Attacks
- Hardware Failure
- Power Cuts / Natural Disasters
These five types are worth considering when working on a business continuity plan and asking, How can you mitigate the impact of these threats and how can you recover if you are hit? Supporting your business with recovery technology such as a BCDR solution is a great way to protect your servers and business data.
To learn more about about BCDR Solutions check out Datto SIRIS >
As well as protecting critical business functions, the following assets might be among the most valuable to protect. However every business is different so make a note of the systems that are critical for you.
- Servers
- Phones
- Network connections
- Network drives
- Online systems
- Business-related applications
With a business continuity plan in place, your business will be positioned to continually maintain smooth operations and ensure data protection, no matter what events arise.
When it comes to testing your business continuity plan it’s worth being aware of another vital process called “Disaster Recovery”.
Business Continuity Plan Vs Disaster Recovery Plan
While business continuity involves planning for keeping all aspects of a business functioning in the midst of disruptive events, disaster recovery focuses on the IT or technology systems that support business functions.
