Business Continuity refers to a company’s ability to keep its main business activities running after and after a crisis that has disrupted them. This is a subset of the wider disaster recovery sector.
The execution of scheduled emergency steps after a business crisis to return the organisation to a baseline level of operations is referred to as disaster recovery. The part about business continuity applies to attempts to keep core business processes running after a disaster. In this context, a disaster” could refer to a wide range of events, including both physical and digital disasters (office fires, floods, and power outages, data breaches, ransomware attacks etc.).
Here is an example of effective disaster recovery helping to maintain business continuity:
A company’s entire network could be replicated and backed up in the cloud. If staff must work from home during a disaster (such as following an office fire) they can connect to a virtualised copy of their network running on a cloud service like Microsoft Azure. While maybe not as easy or efficient as operating from their office in the long run, it enables them to continue servicing their clients and doing business in the short term, ensuring that their business maintains continuity throughout the disaster recovery period and continues to generate income while the rest of the disaster recovery.
How Do I Know What To Put In A Disaster Recovery Plan?
Every company should have a business continuity plan of some form in place, but not every company would have the resources or budget to carry out all its operations in the event of a disaster. As a result, the first step in developing an effective disaster recovery plan is to be realistic and identify which functions of your company are truly critical, and then devise a strategy that addresses how to keep those functions running within your budget.
If keeping in touch with customers and operating a helpdesk was your most important function, you would need to make sure you had a functional, cloud-based VoIP telecoms telecoms system in place that your employees could access from any device in the event of a disaster which affected your communications.
How Can Carden IT Services Help Me?
Our disaster recovery teams at Carden IT Services will collaborate with you and your account manager to create a bespoke business continuity and disaster recovery plan that will give you peace of mind. With this plan you will know that even if the unexpected happens, thanks to your planning you will be able to keep running and provide excellent customer support with minimal downtime.
Planning for disaster recovery and business continuity is an excellent opportunity to take a comprehensive look at the whole network. Preparing for a catastrophe also entails streamlining technologies and fixing vulnerabilities, which generally increases your company’s overall resilience and performance.
If you are serious about ensuring business continuity in the event of a catastrophe, you’ll need buy-in from employees at all levels of the company, from entry-level to management and even the C-suite. During a fire drill, everyone would know the safety protocols and assembly points, and you would have a designated first aid provider and fire marshal. Similarly, during a disaster, employees will have unique responsibilities and roles to help the company get through the disaster.
Do you have a business continuity disaster recovery plan?
If not, why not? Contact our team to protect your business if the worst should occur