What is Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BCDR)?

What is BCDR?

BCDR is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.  Why is it important? It depends on how much you value your data.

Here are some key steps to take to have a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan:

1) Have a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

You’ve heard the quote, “Failing To Plan Is Planning To Fail” – Benjamin Franklin.  The same goes with IT Infrastructure.  Your data is critical.  We don’t think about worst case scenarios that may happen and what to do if something does happen.  So, you need to create a plan on what to do if a disaster strikes, what steps to take, who to contact, and where to find this information.

What We Do Instead

We will help make sure that you have a plan in place, review it to make sure it is accurate and includes all the necessary information.

2) Test it

Now that you’ve created Business Continuity Plan (BCP), you should have a procedure to test it and make sure that plan works.  What you don’t want to do is to create something and never fully test it and when an outage occurs, the backup plan doesn’t work.  That will waste a lot of valuable time and also, it will not give you the security that the data will be accessible during a catastrophe. So, it is critical that you have a plan to test it.

What We Do Instead

We will help you to execute your plan in all critical areas.  There are some steps that may be skipped but the all major points in your environment should be well tested and ensure that your plan works.  We will review everything in your plan and make sure that it works.

3) Train your Employees

Once you have this plan in place, you need to train your employee at once a yearly (more if needed).  Make it part of your employee’s on boarding process and include it in your employee handbook.  Make sure that you have a check list to verify that the employee has reviewed it and acknowledge the receipt of it and have read it.

What We Do Instead 

We will review your handbook and check list to ensure that you have included this and hold you accountable for anything that is not there.

4) On-Going Maintenance

Once you have your plan created and ready for use, make sure you continue to update it if there is any major changes so that the plan is valid.  Make sure that this information is kept in a central location and not kept with just one person because that person may leave and once that person leaves, that information may be gone.

It should be in an electronic format and it will require an on-going update.

What We Do Instead

We will review with you and give you a 360 analysis of your environment to assess all the major points that have been updated and should be updated.

5) Technical Options  

There are different options for disaster recovery.  You can have a local backup or a cloud based backup (i.e., Recovery Cloud).  Both are good to have and you should have both in case the local backup should fail or there is a physical damage that you can’t get to anymore.  The Cloud option allows you to be able to recovery your data quickly and from anywhere without having to physically be on site.

SUMMARY:

Creating a Business Continuity Disaster Recovery plan involves both non-technical and technical aspects, with a major part of it being planning and the lesser critical part being execution but still important.  Do you have all of these in place?  Can you confidently say that you can get all your back up data when a disaster strikes?  How much time will it take to restore your data?

For more information, read this post: BCDR: Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery.

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