What is business continuity planning?
When disaster strikes, it is almost always unexpected and can lead to serious losses for an organization. But a business can always be prepared for the worst-case scenarios. This is where Managed IT services can help develop and execute a business continuity plan (BCP) that is current and effective.
What is a business continuity plan?
It is a system that helps prevent and recover from potential threats to a business. The threats could range from natural causes like hurricanes and floods to man-made reasons like cyber attacks.
Mobile Computer Services, Inc. suggests several steps that must be taken to develop a robust BCP:
- Understand the risks and threats to the business and their implications:
- Is the area prone to severe weather events?
- What is the likelihood or frequency of an extended power outage?
- What if Internet connectivity was lost?
- Can the team quickly detect and contain a cyberattack?
- Identify functions and critical dependencies across important business areas:
- Human resources
- Business processes
- Key assets
- Supply chains
- Business partners
- Business Impact Analysis: Here, the business can identify functions and related resources that are time-sensitive. What are the losses the business would suffer if the downtime was for a day, a week, or more? This would help in prioritization.
- Recovery: The business must identify and implement steps to recover critical business functions.
- Organization: A continuity team must be created to devise a plan and manage the disruption.
- Training: The continuity team must be trained and tested. Members of the team should also complete exercises that go over the plan and strategies.
- Testing and review: Constant testing and review highlight areas of improvement.
Essentially a business continuity plan is an insurance policy for technology infrastructure and data, which in many cases represents the core of an organization’s business.
What is a Disaster Recovery Plan?
A disaster recovery plan (DRP), which focuses on the recovery of a company's IT system after a crisis, is a part of a BCP. Every organization, from small operations to the largest enterprises, is dependent on digital technologies to generate revenue, provide services, and support customers.
There is an undeniable trend that is fusing business continuity and disaster recovery into a single term, BCDR - Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. This is proof of the fact that business and technology teams need to collaborate closely, instead of working in silos.
The key steps involved in a DRP are:
- Define recovery objectives: The key purpose of a DRP is to reduce downtime and the cost of data loss. The objectives set with recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) will help build an optimal data recovery plan.
- Identify key professionals: The DRP should have documented information on how and when to contact the concerned personnel and their assigned responsibilities in detail.
- Document network configuration guide: A step-by-step documentation of the network configuration will help in the execution of the data recovery process. Ideally, these documents should be offline or in a private cloud.
- Choose the recovery technique: Different methods of data recovery come at different costs. Depending upon the company requirements - on-premise, outsourced, or cloud-based - the technique could be chosen.
- Create an incident checklist: Some incidents may not warrant the execution of a DRP. Therefore a checklist, based on a company’s goals and budgets for data recovery, would help decide the need for a recovery procedure.
- Document the recovery procedure: A documented set of procedures in accordance with the RTO and RPO standards helps in the efficient execution of a DRP.
- Test, retest: A thoroughly tested plan creates reliability and ensures efficiency. The DRP team should participate in real-time scenarios of data loss and cyberattacks to stay updated.
- Update the plan: As the company grows, the DRP may become obsolete. The flaws must be detected in time and the strategy must be updated to ensure success. The changes may also be recorded.
A business can associate with Managed IT services like Mobile Computer Services, Inc. for an effective BCP and DRP to ensure there are no disruptions in business continuity.
Why Mobile Computer Services?
Mobile Computer Services is a professional IT services company that works with small and medium-sized businesses in Raleigh NC. When it comes to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans, MCS :
- Offers industry-leading backup and recovery services for critical business data, regardless of the nature of the emergency.
- Prioritizes data protection and recovery preparation.
- Scrutinizes every aspect of the data backup and restoration security plan, including e-mail, customer databases, and sensitive information.
- Provides a proactive team that provides 24x7 network monitoring.
Contact Mobile Computer Services, Inc. at Raleigh NC today at (919) 830-9448 to find out about its Managed IT services such as Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning.
