Whether the cause is a human error, policy failure, natural disaster, cyber-attack or power outage, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans are created to minimise your business’s downtime to save your revenue and reputation… and if you want to safeguard your business’s data, keep your customers, protect your brand, and generally maintain a functioning business model, you’ll need to develop a BC/DR plan – a comprehensive guide created by a business to outline how operations will adapt and proceed during a disruption.
Time is of the essence when there is system failure, so pre-planning maps an efficient solution as well as shortening response and recovery times. The cost of infrastructure failure to a business can be crippling so BC/DR plans are necessary even when things are going well; however, according to Databarrack’s Data Health Check 2022 report, only 57% of small businesses have a business continuity plan compared with 98% of large companies.
When it comes to managing a data breach, software malfunction or damaged hardware, a great starting point for your BC/DR is the strategy you use for planned outages. While backing up your data should be at least a daily task, you should already have a process in place to make sure your information is saved and accessible during downtime for scheduled maintenance and backups.
At enablesIT, we work with our clients to create a plan that maintains operations as close to ‘business as usual’ as possible whilst offering a cost effective and flexible approach to disaster recovery, ensuring clients can access data safely, securely, and, if necessary, remotely. Dedicated storage space is set up and costs are determined on an annual basis depending on size of storage required with a cloud-hosted server running continuous restores from the backup.
In the event of a disaster, the data drive is disconnected from the restore Virtual Machine and reconnected to a host server in the cloud with appropriate resources, considering the RAM and CPU resources available in the usual environment. The cost for this is usually determined on a daily basis and should be covered by insurance. However, it is worth noting that the British Insurance Brokers’ Association state that ‘Insurers have recognised the benefit of Risk Management and Business Continuity Planning and will offer premiums that reflect suitably protected businesses.’
So, whilst there is a cost to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning, can you afford not to?