What is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)?
Running a business is no easy feat, and it's made that much harder by the threat of natural disasters, data breaches, or cyberattacks that can happen at any given moment. Such cases can lead to delayed business operations, financial or legal problems, or even business shutting down.
So, how can businesses prepare for the worst? The answer lies in implementing a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan. BCDR strategies are the solution that helps businesses respond to events such as server failures and other threats quickly and get systems back on track.
This article will provide a comprehensive guide to help your business understand BCDR, why it’s important, and how it can help prevent downtime so your business operations can continue running smoothly.
Table of contents
- What is the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery?
- Business Continuity
- How to build a Business Continuity plan
- Disaster Recovery
- How to build a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)
What is BCDR?
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) is an organization's ability to maintain operations and essential functions during unexpected events. BCDR’s purpose is to limit risks of data loss and other emergencies to support services and protect the organization’s reputation.
What is the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery?
Although two different concepts, BCDR is combined into one as companies and executives recognize the need to collaborate and unite the two for effective incident response planning. Next, we will break down BCDR and learn their differences and how they mutually benefit businesses.
Business Continuity
Business Continuity is a proactive approach of processes and procedures organizations implement to ensure critical business functions are not delayed and can continue even after disruptions such as:
- Natural disasters
- Cyberattacks
- Server/equipment failure
BC requires more comprehensive planning for long-term challenges that must be prevented if an organization is to have long-term success in maintaining and providing services for its customers.
How to build a Business Continuity plan
To build a BC plan, your team should take the following steps.
- Conduct a business impact analysis
First, you need to understand your business's risks. A business impact analysis (BIA) can help identify and evaluate the potential impact of a disaster or internal and external vulnerabilities on your business operations.
The BIA should also identify the likelihood of such events so the organization can prioritize and plan accordingly.
2. Design responses
Once the BIA is complete, your team can start planning the responses to threats you have identified. Each one will have different impacts to your business, so each threat requires a plan to spot and address each threat.
3. Identify key roles and responsibilities
Next will be documenting how key members of your team respond to a crisis. Each team member’s responsibilities are documented with the resources they need to fulfill their roles. Communication steps are also essential to this process so each member can communicate and get the organization running efficiently as quickly as possible.
4. Test and update plans
Due to the increase in cyberattacks and the unpredictability of events such as natural disasters, your BCDR plan should be updated and tested constantly to ensure it is up-to-date and able to deal with potential threats.
To do so, your team can rehearse scenarios such as cyberattacks, fires, floods, employee errors, outages, or other relevant threats your team has planned for to help build your team’s confidence and efficiency in dealing with these threats.
Disaster Recovery
The key differences between BC and DR are:
- Business Continuity refers to a broader scope that ensures all critical business functions can continue during and after a disruption.
- Disaster Recovery refers to restoring IT systems and data after a disaster.
Therefore, the primary goal of disaster recovery is to ensure that an organization can quickly regain access to its critical technology resources and data, minimizing downtime and data loss.
How to build a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)
Similar to Business Continuity plans, a DRP requires a business impact analysis (BIA) that outlines roles and responsibilities and requires constant testing and refinement. DRPs focus more on risk analysis data backup, and recovery, so they are more reactive than a BCP.
These are the widely used five-step process for creating a DRP:
- Conduct a business impact analysis
Begin by assessing each threat your company may face and its ramifications, as per the BCP process. Teams should analyze potential threats that could impact your daily operations or communication platforms.
An effective BIA will also consider the following:
- Loss of revenue
- Downtime costs
- Public Relations cost
- Loss of customers and investors (short and long-term)
- Penalties for violating compliance laws
- Analyze risks
A DRP will need a more thorough risk assessment as it is focused more on recovery efforts. Again, during this phase, consider the risk’s likelihood and potential impact on your business.
2. Create an asset inventory
An important part of an effective DRP is being certain of what your asset owns, its purposes, and its functions. Conduct a regular asset inventory to identify the hardware, software, IT infrastructure, or other things your organization owns that are essential to your business operation.
Once completed, group them into critical, important, and unimportant categories.
- Critical: critical assets are what your enterprise requires for normal business operations.
- Important: assets that you use at least once a day, which would impact business operations (but not shut them down entirely) if they are disrupted.
- Unimportant: These are assets your business uses infrequently that are not essential for normal business operations.
3. Establish roles and responsibilities
Like BCP development, clarify and outline the responsibilities of team members so they have what is needed to perform their required duties.
Some things to consider when building your DRP are:
- Use an Incident reporter: Someone who maintains contact information for relevant parties and communicates with business leaders and stakeholders when disruptive events occur.
- DRP supervisor: The DRP supervisor ensures that team members perform their assigned tasks during an incident.
- Asset manager: Someone whose job it is to secure and protect critical assets when a disaster strikes.
- Third-party liaison: The person who coordinates with any third-party vendors or service providers you’ve hired as part of your DRP and updates stakeholders accordingly on how the DRP is going.
4. Test and refine your DRP
Both your BCP and DCP need constant practice and refinement to be effective for your business. Therefore, practice and update both according to any new changes. For example, add any new assets to your DRP plan to protect it in the future.
The Benefits of BCDR
Enterprises that don’t effectively plan for data loss, penalties, breaches, or other threats are putting their business, employees, and customers at risk. BCDR will help prevent these risks and take advantage of the following benefits.
Less downtime
Unexpected downtime can cost businesses millions, and cyberattacks can have even more devastating impacts, such as loss of customers, reputation, and investors. BCDR will increase a business's effectiveness in returning to normal after unplanned incidents.
Save money
The latest IBM data breach report found that the average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024.
Businesses can save money by starting, monitoring, and updating their BCDR for faster recovery. Organizations should also consider that without a strong BCDR plan, they may not be eligible for cyber insurance.
Fewer fines
If a data breach occurs, businesses will face many fines from regulatory bodies such as the CCPA or GDPR, and consumers can also claim compensation. Heavily regulated sectors, such as healthcare and finance, may face significant penalties due to the sensitivity of the data they hold.
As penalties usually reflect the severity of the breach, maintaining BC and reducing response and recovery times will keep penalties low in the worst-case scenario.
Possible BCDR scenarios your business may face
Expecting the unexpected is part of a BCDR manager's job. They plan for events or combinations of events that could harm the business.
Take the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. The pandemic led to supply chain disruptions, and many people left or lost their jobs. Ransomware generally follows these kinds of events or natural disasters with the hope of exploiting businesses while their efforts are focused on other events.
Here are some scenarios your team should consider during the initial stages of a BCDR plan.
Natural disasters
Natural disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, and fires, can have devastating effects on physical infrastructure, business operations, and employee safety.
To prepare for or be aware of the risks, leaders should investigate the frequency and probability of these kinds of events based on geography, e.g., where headquarters, offices, or servers are located.
Power or IT outages
Power outages will usually follow with natural disasters, so this should also be included in the initial risk assessment stage.
Backing up data regularly will help prevent data loss and aid in data recovery. Aside from that, your team may wish to consider utilizing uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) like backup generators, for additional protection.
Ensure backups are scheduled regularly and your emergencies are also tested often.
Cyberattacks
Ransomware is the most common cyberattack that businesses face. It encrypts and locks your files, which will remain inaccessible until your company pays a ransom. Businesses must plan for other attacks, including phishing, malware, or human error.
Public health crisis
Since COVID-19, businesses have had to quickly switch to remote or flexible work environments, meaning many organizations have had to adapt rapidly to areas such as cloud collaboration, secure file sharing, and remote work online safety.
Although many businesses offer remote or hybrid work environments, knowing exactly what to do in a health crisis such as a pandemic, epidemic, disease outbreak, or bioterrorism will contribute to an effective BCDR plan and ensure your team knows how to work remotely safely.
How to build a BCDR plan
Creating a BCDR plan will involve separating BC and DR components. A BC plan should contain:
- contact information,
- management procedures,
- guidelines on how and when to use the plan,
- step-by-step procedures of what to do
- a schedule for reviewing, testing, and updating the plan.
Next, your disaster recovery plan should include:
- A summary of key action steps and contact information.
- The defined responsibilities of the DR team.
- Guidelines for when to use the plan.
- The DR policy statement.
- Plan goals and history.
- Information on geographical risks.
- Incident response and recovery steps.
- Authentication tools.
Finally, once the BCDR plan is completed and approved, your team should conduct regular testing to see if it works as expected and if any changes are needed. Testing can help employees learn, add new steps, and address concerns to prepare for real-life scenarios.
Testing frequency will depend on your organization's size and resources, but it's recommended to conduct Business Continuity tests annually, full DR tests twice a year, and tabletop exercises in between tests to review what went well and what can be improved.
How Internxt can help businesses with BCDR
Internxt cloud storage for business or Internxt S3 object storage, are secure and encrypted cloud platforms to help your organization store, back up, and protect confidential files and sensitive information.
Internxt cloud storage for business
Internxt protects businesses from data breaches with end-to-end client-side encryption and ensures enterprises comply with GDPR regarding data handling and protection.
As your data can also be backed up from your Drive account, and your files are encrypted and spread across multiple servers, the most recent copies of your business data will always be accessible, even in the case of natural disasters.
Internxt also includes secure collaboration features, such as encrypted file sharing and access management, and you can also monitor sessions to protect against unauthorized access.
Internxt Business Plans allow you to allocate up to 2TB of data for up to 100 users, with prices starting as low as €6.99/month/user. Or, you can save up to 10% on annual plans, that offer 2TB of storage for up to 100 users for €99.99/user/year.
Internxt object storage
For businesses who need a solution to store huge amounts of data, and scale this storage to meet their needs, Internxt S3-compatible object solution is the perfect integration for a BCDP plan.
Internxt object storage is an ultra-fast, easily accessible, and affordable solution to store as much data as you need at a cost that suits you. Not only is Internxt’s object storage up to 80% more affordable than Google, Azure, or Microsoft, there are also no data transfer fees.
Plus, Internxt is dedicated to protecting businesses from data breaches, potentially saving your business hundreds and thousands from data breaches and regulatory fines.
Get started with Internxt’s object storage for just €7 a month, and add secure cloud storage to your BCDR plan today!