Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BCDR)

Business Continuity

Business continuity refers to an organization’s ability to continue essential operations and services during and after disruptions, such as natural disasters, technological failures, human errors, or other unexpected events. Business continuity planning (BCP) is a proactive approach that involves identifying potential risks, developing strategies to mitigate these risks, and ensuring the resilience of critical business functions. Here’s an overview of key components and steps involved in business continuity:

Components of Business Continuity

Risk Assessment and Impact Analysis:

• Identify potential threats and vulnerabilities that could disrupt business operations. • Conduct a thorough impact analysis to assess the consequences of disruptions on critical processes, resources, and stakeholders.

Business Impact Analysis (BIA):

• Prioritize business functions and processes based on their criticality to the organization’s operations and objectives. • Determine recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for each critical function.

Business Continuity Plan (BCP):

• Develop a comprehensive BCP that outlines procedures, protocols, and responsibilities for responding to disruptions. • Define roles and responsibilities of key personnel involved in executing the plan.

Emergency Response and Crisis Management:

• Establish protocols for immediate response to emergencies, including evacuation procedures, communication protocols, and activation of crisis management teams. • Conduct regular training and drills to ensure preparedness and effectiveness of emergency response procedures.

Backup and Recovery Strategies:

• Implement robust data backup and recovery strategies to safeguard critical information and systems. • Regularly test backup systems to verify integrity and availability of data during a disruption.

IT Disaster Recovery (DR):

• Develop IT disaster recovery plans to restore IT systems and infrastructure following a disruption. • Ensure redundancy and failover mechanisms are in place to minimize downtime and data loss.

Supplier and Vendor Management:

• Assess dependencies on external suppliers and vendors for critical goods and services. • Establish alternative sourcing arrangements and contingency plans to maintain supply chain resilience.

Communication and Stakeholder Engagement:

• Establish communication channels and protocols for timely and transparent communication with employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders during a crisis. • Provide regular updates and instructions to stakeholders to minimize confusion and maintain trust.

In summary, business continuity planning is essential for organizations to anticipate, prepare for, and respond effectively to disruptions that could jeopardize business operations. By implementing comprehensive BCPs and fostering a culture of resilience, organizations can enhance their ability to withstand and recover from unexpected events.

Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) aids organizations in resuming regular business activities in the event of a disaster. Despite their close relationship, business continuity (BC) is a more proactive approach, aiming to maintain operations before, during and after a disaster whilst disaster recovery (DR) is more reactive, focusing on critical processes and roles, mostly recovery post disaster. Both processes focus on two important components:

  1. Recovery Time objective (RTO) which is a term used to describe how long it takes to resume business operations following an unforeseen event. This is the first and most important step an enterprise should consider when creating their disaster recovery plan.
  2. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the quantity of data a business can tolerate losing and yet recover from a disaster. Given that many modern businesses consider data protection to be essential, some regularly replicate data to a different data center in order to provide continuity in the event of a significant breach. Some people know they can recover from whatever they’ve lost during that period by setting an RPO of a few minutes or even hours for them to restore company data from a backup system. (Flinders, M., Smalley, I. 2023).

References:

Andrade, E., Nogueira, B., Matos, R., Callou, G. and Maciel, P. (2017). Availability modeling and analysis of a disaster-recovery-as-a-service solution. Computing, 99(10), pp.929–954. Available from: doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-017-0539-8. [Accessed 03 April 2024]

Flinders, M. and Smalley, I. (2023). What Is Business Continuity Disaster recovery? IBM. [online] www.ibm.com. Available from: https://www.ibm.com/topics/business-continuity-disaster-recovery. [Accessed 14 April 2024].

Acronis. (2024). What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DraaS)? [2024]. [online] Available from: https://www.acronis.com/en-gb/blog/posts/draas/ [Accessed 14 April 2024].

Cloudian. (n.d.). Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS): Why, Where and How. [online] Available from: https://cloudian.com/guides/disaster-recovery/disaster-recovery-as-a-service-draas-why-where-and-how/. [Accessed 14 April 2024].