Businesses nowadays have learned the hard way how valuable recovery of office data and functions are during sudden disasters. In such cases, business continuity and disaster recovery plans are essential for companies to return to everyday activities. When planning for disaster, however, often employers mistake these plans as one rather than two tools for recovery. So, how can you prepare your business for critical events through business continuity and disaster recovery plans? Let’s review how each plan works to decide the best course of action to protect your company.
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Business Continuity
Business continuity plans focus strictly on how organizations can keep their core business operations running throughout and after disastrous events. Simply put, business continuity helps you strategically respond to disruptions by keeping a certain level of employees, communications, and IT services working in-office for clients and partners.
To uphold these necessary measurements, however, business continuity plans must also justify all legal, contract and regulatory requirements and costs to stay open under disastrous conditions. Known as a business impact analysis, this process mimics a risk assessment to help determine what impacts an event has on vendor’s operations as well as your own. Examples of incidents business continuity covers for organizations include:
- Cyberattacks
- Widespread Illness
- Dangerous Weather
- Building Damage
Whatever the circumstance, it’s crucial for companies to establish a stable business continuity plan for backup locations and data recovery options in case of emergencies. Without a contingency plan, your business will struggle to run under stressful conditions.
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery plans focus on how to restore all essential IT applications and business data following a crisis. By ensuring a company’s necessary support networks and processes keep running, disaster recovery plans help reduce potential downtime and disastrous impacts without losing much data. Scenarios in which disaster recovery plans protect businesses may include:
- Power outages
- Natural disasters
- Human error
Unlike business continuity plans, though, disaster recovery strictly hopes to restore normal business activity rather than lessen damages. In order to return to daily operations and optimal productivity, then, organizations must secure a thorough disaster recovery plan to recover from critical events.
Preparing Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans
Regardless of how these plans are structured, companies require both business continuity and disaster recovery plans to restore normal operations following sudden crises. What makes these plans so complimentary just so happens to be their key difference: time. Business continuity works to keep business operations going during and after an event, while disaster recovery works to return normal operations once the disaster is over.
Together, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plans support companies by lessening damage during critical recovery periods. When working as a whole plan, though, certain steps must be taken to manage a BCDR plan, such as:
- Business Assessment: To expose potential threats or flaws within the business structure, it’s crucial to review your company’s current status in personnel or software and update your business continuity and disaster recovery plans accordingly.
- Resolve Risks: Identifying potential risks in either security, plan operations, or network flaws in your BCDR plans could save your business from major setbacks. Regular assessments will help update your plans for full protection of your data assets.
- Routinely Test BCDR Plan: Annual reviews of your business protection plans will ensure not only complete protection of your company’s important data, but also faster recovery in daily operations. There are several testing methods to choose for your BCDR plan to evaluate anything from backup networks to office relocations.
- Set Backup Data Storage: Knowing exactly where your business’ critical data and assets are stored holds the greatest importance while planning business continuity and disaster recovery, as this storage can help workers restart operations in case IT members are unavailable.
- Establish Recovery Teams: Designating personnel to act during emergency situations proves essential for both business continuity and disaster recovery operations. Through their proactive actions in restarting office functions and coordinating documents, these teams can help kickstart your organization’s recovery in an effective, organized manner.
Make Your Plan with Kraft Business Solutions
Having a business continuity and disaster recovery plan can help protect your organization from potential disasters or unexpected crises by reducing the time and damage taken to restore productivity. Without a BCDR plan set aside, companies may struggle to recover, wasting time and resources that could potentially sink any possibility of recovery into bankruptcy. Make Kraft Business Solutions part of your organization’s BCDR plan with our customizable Managed IT and Document Management solutions to protect your valuable data. To learn more about our various IT services, contact Kraft Business Solutions today.
