Does the idea of your business falling under keep you up at night? The best way to stay de-stressed and less worried is to prepare yourself via planning and forward thinking. We can help you with this as an IT company that is well-versed in all aspects of disaster recovery and business continuity planning!
When you aren’t sure which is more important for you in the disaster recovery vs. business continuity debate, come to the professional IT service company that understands the high-stress requirements of modern businesses. We can help you navigate the difficult waters of cybersecurity and disaster planning and guide you down the right path – call today!
What Is the Difference Between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity?
If you experience a total network failure, you want to have a plan in place for how to get back to working order. Both disaster recovery and business continuity plans respond to the same type of incident, but they prioritize and deal with the incident in different manners:
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery is a short-term plan that deals simply and effectively with recovering your systems after a disaster. This type of incident response plan includes:
- Technology plans
- Minimizing downtime
- Restoring IT systems
Disaster recovery is very focused on IT and computer-based systems but will be narrowly focused compared to the higher perspective of business continuity plans.
Business Continuity
Business continuity plans are robust and high-perspective, but this can result in ‘missing the trees for the forest’ – neglecting details due to interest in the big picture that might focus on
- Staffing issues
- Supply chain troubles
- Business Operations
Business continuity plans often only have a cursory approach to IT, relying on an IT team with its preparation and plans to deal with technological problems.
Having either one of these plans in place is necessary, but having both will ensure that your business can handle any kind of disaster, whether a literal fire in the building or a figurative fire in the network. Because these two plans cover similar but disparate approaches to the same incidents, you take the time and effort to formulate both kinds of incident response plans. The choice between disaster recovery vs. business continuity can be difficult, but both have similar structure and direction.
What You Need for a Disaster Recovery Plan
When formulating your incident response plans, creating a disaster recovery plan (DRP) should include your IT team at all stages of thought. In most industries, there is a general ‘rule of thumb’ four-step process that can be very helpful as you get started:
Business Impact Analysis
What are your biggest concerns and fears as a business? You can never come up with all the potential damaging attacks you could face, but you can prioritize based on the business you do and what you need to perform your day-to-day tasks – form a list of the worst threats you face and use these to guide your planning.
Inventory of Assets
Take the time to do a complete inventory of your business’s assets so you understand not only what valuable items and information might be attacked but also what you have to leverage in your recovery. This should include everything from critical business operations to unimportant or infrequently used assets.
Delegate Responsibilities
When a disaster strikes, you should know who is always doing what. Who will be in charge of restoring your data backups? Who will quarantine affected files and systems? Too many cooks will spoil the broth, and keeping your employees focused will ensure your business is back online quickly.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Regular rehearsals and practice of your disaster recovery plan will guarantee no confusion when carrying out your disaster recovery plan is most important. Regular practice also ensures that you keep updating and enhancing your plan – did you add a new system that wasn’t considered before? Do you know how to use a new recovery tool to its full effect?
How to Create a Business Continuity Plan
You can quickly see the differences when comparing disaster recovery vs. business continuity. While a disaster recovery plan is fairly focused and detailed, a business continuity plan (BCP) is more structured around responses and mitigating damage rather than recovering and returning to full capacity ASAP. Both are valid and often work in tandem, but the difference is important.
Business Impact Analysis
BIA is essential to business continuity, summarizing the potential threats and vulnerabilities your venture may face. Unlike a disaster recovery plan, your BCP should prioritize your threats and vulnerabilities according to the likelihood of the event, not the criticality of the system.
Create Responses
Rather than focusing on your inventory of assets, your BCP will create all your plans for responding to the most likely harm and damage that might affect your business. Every event will require an individual strategy, but you can’t possibly form a plan for all possible events.
Assign Roles and Responsibilities
Once you have effectively planned around your most likely and damaging events, you should ensure that all team members have assigned roles and responsibilities. Delegation is one of the most important parts of planning, providing a fast process of running your business smoothly.
Rehearse and Revise as Needed
No part of your business should be wholly set in stone. Remaining flexible and agile will keep your business moving forward without issues. You may have to rehearse your plans more often since you will have more plans in place to practice.
What Do Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans Look Like?
Business continuity and disaster recovery plans work very well to provide you with ways to handle the worst occasions you might experience. But it’s hard to picture what these kinds of plans might look like once you have them formed – here are a few examples of what you might put together in your planning process:
- Crisis Management Plan: This plan should define crises like power outages, cybercrime, or natural disasters and provide an hour-by-hour description of what pressures will be faced and how to respond to the event
- Communications plan: BCP and DRP should detail how to communicate your recovery efforts during an unplanned incident – internally and externally.
- Data center recovery plan: your DRP should include a plan for re-establishing data security and fending off subsequent cyberattacks via your data center partner.
- Network recovery plan: When you lose internet access or connection to your local area network or any other network, you need a plan to define how to approach this communication interruption.
If you think you’ve decided which you want to prioritize between disaster recovery vs. business continuity, then you’re ready to join us in planning!
Find Your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Solutions with PC Professional!
Are you ready to live and work with the peace of mind that only preparation can bring? Call us! We are a professional IT company serving the San Francisco Bay Area that will ensure that your business has the best possible experience as you construct your business continuity and disaster recovery plans.
Don’t hesitate to start protecting your business – hackers and natural disasters won’t wait for you to be ready! So call today and start discussing how we can help you be prepared for the worst possible disasters.
