Does Your IT Business Continuity Plan (BCP) Pass the Test?

Regardless of the size of your business, regular data backups and recovery are important so you can formulate an effective IT business continuity plan (BCP) that minimizes downtime. Your organization cannot afford to overlook data backup, data recovery, and systems recovery in its business continuity and disaster recovery plan.

Given the number of days it takes to bring your business back online after a disaster, and the hours it takes to recover lost data after an unplanned deletion, you stand at a risk of permanently losing customers. Furthermore, while your workers or partners sit idle, powerless to accomplish business-critical processes that depend on organizational technology, you could lose in both cases. As such, investments in disaster recovery and backups are reasonable.

What is included in an IT business continuity planning?

IT business continuity planning (BCP) involves all the processes that an organization undertakes to establish a prevention and recovery structure from possible threats, including cyber-attacks, natural disasters, or human-made disasters.

A significant feature of an IT business continuity plan is a disaster recovery plan that includes plans, strategies, or policies for handling IT disruptions to servers, networks, personal mobile devices, and computers. An ideal IT business continuity plan should include how to reinvent organization efficiency and enterprise software so that critical business requirements can be met.

An effective BCP offers comprehensive approaches to how business operations can be sustained during short-term and long-term outages. BCP includes a checklist made up of data backups, supplies and equipment, and backup site locations.

Likewise, BCP can also distinguish plan administrators and include backup site providers, key personnel, and contact details for emergency responders. It would help if you outlined your manual workloads in the BCP so that the business operations can continue until your systems can be restored.

What are data backup and disaster recovery?

Data backup and disaster recovery are the processes involved in generating and storing copies of data that can be applied to shield organizations against the possibility of data loss. A suitable backup copy is stored in a distinct system or medium.

Notwithstanding, there’s a significant difference between data backup and disaster recovery. Data backup describes the process of creating extra copies of data to protect it. You may restore backup data when you encounter a challenge with a software upgrade, a database corruption, or an accidental deletion.

On the other hand, disaster recovery describes the plan and processes for swiftly recreating access to IT resources, data, and applications after a flood, tornado, or even a simple outage. Recovery is a significant factor in backup software. It is not only crucial for your data to be reliably stored, but you also need to be able to retrieve your data in case of data loss successfully.

A few companies misinterpret data backup for disaster recovery. However, most companies soon realize after a severe outage that having extra copies of data doesn’t necessarily guarantee your IT business continuity.

You need a strong, tested IT business continuity plan to keep your business continuously operational. Become an EC-Council Community Member by signing up for our EDRP program today!

What is the importance of data backup and recovery?

Regular data backup and recovery is arguably the single most important strategy to prevent network or system disaster. The following are the reasons why you need professional IT support for backups

To prevent data loss

One of the major reasons for data backup and recovery strategies is to ensure that critical data and information are saved in case of a software or hardware failure. Regardless of the industry you operate in, all data is a target. Malicious hackers will attack any business to acquire sensitive information, fulfill a personal vendetta, or just for the fun of it.

Thinking you are safe because you own a small company is a big mistake. A survey has shown that 43 percent of all cyberattacks are mainly directed at small businesses. So, a company that has data backup and disaster recovery included in its IT business continuity plan would have a competitive gain over other companies that fail to back up their critical data.

Backups and recovery save you money

Routine data backups and disaster recovery are crucial components of your IT business continuity plan. Considering that computer networks maintain so many aspects of modern businesses, losing your network data can have a paralyzing financial impact on your organization.

According to the survey conducted by Security Week, it was discovered that downtime and data lost cost IT leaders from 24 countries 17 trillion USD in the last two years. It’s not only major security breaches that have crippling effects. Even small security breaches that affect several files can have a crippling effect on small businesses.

Unless you have the money to throw away to prevent and resolve issues that accompany data loss, then its time you consider having an effective IT business continuity plan. EDRP certification program offers security professionals IT business continuity training accompanies with a business continuity management certification. 

Backups guarantee business continuity

Businesses that fail to include data backup, data recovery, and system recovery into their IT business continuity plan have to start from scratch after a disaster. FEMA released a statistic that suggests that about 40% of businesses who fail to backup their data fail to open their businesses after being hit by natural disasters. It was also discovered that 25% run out of business within a year.

Regrettably, most businesses still don’t apply the right approach to backups, while others fail to implement any backup. The right backup strategy includes cloud backups, testing backups, the 3-2-1 backup strategy, encryption of data-in-transit, and the 24/7 support strategy.

Note that backing up isn’t an all-or-nothing strategy. The chances of losing all your critical data when a disaster happens aren’t highly likely. However, it isn’t a bad idea to take proactive measures to keep your data safe should such an event occur. You might want as many levels of backup repertoires as possible to ensure maximum data protection.

Source: eccouncil.org