What is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery(BCDR)?
According to Techopedia, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) is a set of procedures and techniques used to assist an organization in recovering from a disaster and continuing or restarting routine business operations. It encompasses both IT and business roles and responsibilities in the aftermath of a disaster.
BCDR enables businesses to adapt to and recover from disruptions while continuing with business as usual.
What is
the Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?
In the event of a catastrophe or disaster, the goals of the BC and DR plans are to restore order. Even though they work well together, they are not the same thing and serve different purposes.
Business Continuity
The processes and procedures that an organization has put in place to guarantee that its main operations can continue regardless of adverse circumstances are referred to as "business continuity." The ability to maintain services or operations after or during a disruptive event is known as business continuity.
Every aspect of an organization is included in a business continuity plan: its partners in business, employees, communication channels, office building, IT infrastructure, etc. It includes predetermined responsibilities and specific actions that must be taken when disaster strikes.
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery, on the other hand, focuses on your company's technology and aims to restore operations and systems as soon as possible after an incident. Business continuity often includes disaster recovery as an essential component.
After a disaster, important IT applications and data must be restored using a disaster recovery plan. By ensuring that essential support systems are up and running as quickly as possible with minimal data loss, disaster recovery focuses on minimizing both downtime and the effects of a disaster.
Benefits of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
- Encourage Team Collaboration
- Improve Cost-Efficiency
- Demonstrate Commitment
- Gain Competitive Advantage
- Identify Potential Disruptions
- Maintain Reputation
- Safeguard Assets
How Are
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Connected?
Disaster recovery and business continuity are crucial components of an organization's overall risk management strategy. Without a disaster recovery plan, a business continuity strategy would be useless, and disaster recovery does not guarantee business continuity. To lessen the impact on business that a disaster could have, both the BC and DR plans need to work together.
A good business continuity plan requires a disaster recovery plan that guarantees that all IT systems, software, and applications are accessible and recoverable in the event of a disaster. Because they provide particular procedures and strategies for how a business will resume following a crisis, disaster recovery and business continuity are both equally important.
Top
Threats to an Organization’s Continuity
Unexpected physical or virtual occurrences can occur to organizations in a variety of ways. Every business ought to be aware of the top threats to business continuity, which are as follows:
- Cyber Attacks or Data Breaches - The system or data of an organization may be compromised by such events. These threats have the potential to significantly affect, disrupt, and harm organizations.
- Power Outages - Because the majority of businesses rely on electrical equipment, power outages, particularly those that are unplanned, can result in decreased productivity and downtime for the business, which ultimately results in revenue loss.
- Climate Change and Natural Disasters - Extreme weather conditions like earthquakes, floods, storms, heat waves, and droughts can have a negative effect on the services and operations of organizations.
- Infrastructure Failure - Organizations may face unaffordable costs as a result of IT and infrastructure disruptions, as well as productivity, customer, and valuable data loss.
What is a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan?
A combination of strategies, policies, and procedures about how an organization should respond to or adapt to potential threats or unforeseen disruptive events while minimizing the negative effects is known as a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. From malware attacks and natural disasters to accidental deletions and hardware failure, a BCDR plan should account for a variety of scenarios. It contributes to the assurance that routine operations continue without incident, resulting in minimal or no data loss or downtime.
What actions should be taken to ensure that essential business processes continue as usual and how to quickly restore IT systems and data so that business can resume after a disruptive event are included in a BCDR plan.
How to Develop
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans?
There are four important general steps that need to be followed in order to develop a BCDR plan for your organization:
- Assess the organization’s risks
- Design recovery strategies
- Develop and implement the plan
- Test the plan
- Identifying the scope of the plan
- Identifying key business areas
- Identifying critical functions
- Identifying dependencies between various business areas and functions
- Determining acceptable downtime for each critical function
- Creating a plan to maintain operations
- Testing your Business Continuity Plan
- Reviewing and improving your Business Continuity Plan
- Creating a DR response team
- Identifying critical operations and setting goals
- Evaluating potential disaster scenarios
- Creating a communication plan
- Establishing roles and responsibilities
- Developing a data backup and recovery plan
- Testing your plan
- Reviewing and updating your plan
Why is
It Important for an Organization to Have a BCDR Plan?
Businesses can better prepare for potentially disruptive events with the help of a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. It reduces the risk in the event of a natural or man-made disaster and improves an organization's capacity to carry on with business as usual without much or any disruption.
Without a BCDR plan, businesses cannot survive or recover from major disasters. In point of fact, large-scale disasters can cause operations to cease. Within a year of a major disaster, more than 90% of businesses without a disaster recovery plan go out of business. A BCDR plan functions similarly to an organization's insurance policy. BCDR programs assist an organization in mitigating the risk of data loss, recovering from an outage or disruption, reducing overall risk, and protecting its reputation.
Organizational Policies
A policy is a statement and a procedure or protocol that is followed. The policy cycle is used to analyze and develop a policy item. The various steps of the policy cycle are evaluation, implementation, and decision-making. The policy is established boundaries, guidelines, and best practices for acceptable behavior in the organization's business. An identity card and biometric fingerprint scan, for instance, will be used to identify an employee at multinational corporations.
Policies and procedures for the organization serve as a guide for day-to-day operations. Understanding the organization's views and values on particular issues is made easier by its policies and procedures. The significance of policies and procedures lies in the fact that they enable management to direct operations without requiring constant management intervention. The policies of the organization aim to assist businesses in numerous ways. The Policy demonstrates that the business is run effectively and efficiently, increases stability, and ensures consistency in operational procedures and decision-making.
The organization's policies and procedures are general statements that provide step-by-step instructions. Multiple guidelines, which are suggestions for how the policy should be implemented, are included in some policies.
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