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What is BCDR and Why do you need it?
In today’s digital era, organisations face a wide number of threats to their business, these include cyber-attacks, natural disasters, data leakage and power outages. Anyone of these threats can cause downtime, financial and reputational consequences to an organisation which highlights the importance of a robust Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan.
What is BCDR?
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, or BCDR for short, comprises of two separate concepts coming together to provide a framework for minimising downtime, protecting assets, and maintaining business operations during a disaster.
Business continuity refers to the processes and procedures an organisation must implement to ensure that mission critical systems can continue during and after a disaster, often referred to as a business continuity plan. Disaster recovery comprises specific steps that an organisation must take to restore operations after an incident, including IT infrastructure.
What are the key components of an effective BCDR plan?
An effective business continuity plan exists of some key components, tailored to your business. These components are.
- Roles and responsibilities.
- Risk management.
- Business Impact analysis
- Incident Response
- Planning and testing
Within your business continuity plan, you should identify and document which key personnel needs to be involved once a disaster has been identified. Once these people have been identified, their roles, actions and level of decision making, should be clearly defined to allow for a quick and efficient response.
As a business, you should perform risk assessments and analysis to identify potential risks and the impact on the business operations. This should include the identification of critical assets, their dependences, and vulnerabilities to prioritise mitigation efforts.
Determine the financial, operational, and reputational consequences of disruptions to key business processes. This analysis helps establish Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) for each function.
When disruptions to the business occur, an incident response and management plan should be followed to ensure the correct immediate steps are taken. This includes who, what and how to ensure effective management of the situation. A good incident response should help with a swift response, minimise chaos and assist with ensuring the smooth transition to recovery.
Planning, testing, and training.
Planning and testing your BCDR strategy are important to ensure that the strategy you have implemented is fit for purpose. Being able to test the recovery of critical systems is paramount to ensuring business continuity, ensuring that the expected recovery time objectives are met. Being able to test an incident response also ensures that the required people can meet expectations of the business continuity plan, identifying where training may be required.
What are the benefits of BCDR solutions?
There are several benefits to implementing BCDR into your organisation and depending on your business requirements, does depend on all the benefits that you may be able to identify. Some of the key areas to consider are:
- Minimising downtime: Being able to ensure the downtime of your organisation is kept to a minimum is key to ensuring the business remains operational during disruption.
- Unwanted costs: Being able to identify the cost of downtime and implementing your BCDR strategy is paramount to ensuring no extra unwanted costs are undertaken by the business.
- Uphold reputation: Ensuring that you can demonstrate reliability is important to upholding reputation with users, customers and stakeholders.
- Compliance, Regulatory and/or Insurance requirements: Many organisations are required to ensure they can meet minimum requirements when it comes to business continuity and disaster recovery. This could be driven by industry compliance standards and regulations or insurance policies.
How can Symetri help?
Symetri can perform an assessment of your current IT infrastructure BCDR strategy to ensure this meets the current business requirements. Symetri are also able to provide BCDR solutions for your IT infrastructure, whether this is on-premise or in the cloud, ensuring your critical systems are covered.
To find out more, view our range of IT solutions here. Alternative, fill in the form on the right to get in touch with a member of our team.
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