Intelligent business continuity and disaster recovery plans both have crucial roles to play in making your business a success. These plans both provide detailed strategies of how a business will continue after an unplanned interruption or disaster. With news that around 25% of small businesses fail to reopen after a disaster, you can see why having a good plan in place is so important.
Back-up / disaster recovery (BDR) solutions are designed to provide employees with steps they must follow to ensure company data remains safe. It outlines data saving procedures, so that if a disaster does strike a business, the data can be recovered (usually from an external data centre) at a later date.
Intelligent business continuity (IBC) plans, take disaster recovery one step further. Not only do they outline what employees need to do in the event of a disaster but also how the business will continue its operations after the disaster e.g. if they have to move to a temporary location.
Below we have highlighted the three key advantages of IBC over BDR solutions.
Whilst data back-up solutions tend to answer the questions ‘is my data safe?’ and ‘can I get my data back in the event of a disaster?’ business continuity plans are more about the business as a whole. Rather than just thinking about business data, an intelligent business continuity solution covers all of an organisation’s critical processes and operations. An example of a question an IBC solution would be able to answer is ‘if we lost this building, how would we continue with the business?’
IBC solutions provide an in-depth, long term strategy and are therefore, more beneficial to businesses when disaster strikes.
Data back-up is a great first step but in the case of a disaster, the time it takes to recover your data so that your business doesn’t suffer is crucial. For example, if your data was stored on an in-house server and the hardware fails, you would struggle to get the data back quickly if you only had file-level back-up. The entire server would need to be replaced and software would need to be re-installed and configured before you could even think about restoring your business data. As staff wouldn’t have access to the data they need immediately, they would be stuck without anything to do.
If however, you’ve got an intelligent business continuity plan in place, you will have thought of all these possibilities. IBC solutions involve thinking in terms of your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). They give you a clear idea of how long it would take your business to recover in the event of a disaster and the points you would need to prioritise, so you can plan a better disaster recovery solution.
A final advantage of IBC solutions is that they can mitigate damage to your reputation and finances, whilst also helping to ensure that you have the means to keep running your business and therefore, generating a profit.
An organisation that can cope with whatever is thrown at it is deemed far more valuable and reliable to both investors and clients, making an IBC plan an extremely beneficial asset to your business.
Far too many business owners make the mistake of thinking that if they have a disaster recovery plan, then they are safe. Unfortunately this is not the case. In order to survive workplace disasters, you need an intelligent business continuity plan that not only manages data recovery but all aspects of your business, including critical personnel, key business processes and communication.
What is your Business Continuity plan? Have you determined your Recovery Time Objective and/or Recovery Point Objective? Would you like to know more or to discuss this further?
For more information about IBC and BDR solutions, get in touch with Jon Towers on 0131 603 7910 or email Jon.Towers@grantmcgregor.co.uk today.
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