With 6 steps to the business continuity plan

Every minute that a company is offline is not only expensive, but also entails other problems. For example, it is difficult to restore a company's reputation if it is unavailable to its customers due to problems. To prevent this, it makes sense to set up a concrete business continuity plan. That way, in the event of a disaster, such as a ransomware attack or a natural disaster, everyone responsible in the company knows what to do. And it ensures that the company has the necessary resources to keep operations running.

The following 6 steps can be used to develop a business continuity plan.

1. risk assessment

Regardless of a company's size or structure, managers should know where the risks of failure lie. The idea is to list all potential threats to business operations, assess them, and consider how those risks can be most effectively mitigated or eliminated. This risk assessment should be a team effort across the enterprise that considers every business aspect and type of threat, including natural disasters, cyberattacks, ransomware, human error, unplanned downtime, power outages, data corruption and system or hardware failures.

2. analysis of potential effects on the business

It is important that the business continuity planning process includes an analysis of the impact on the business. This may include lost revenue, increased expenses, compliance impact and other factors. As part of this analysis, the individual recovery time objective (RTO) - the downtime a business can tolerate - and recovery point objective (RPO) - the amount of data a business can lose if necessary without the impact being too great - must be defined.

3. identification of critical systems

Once the organization is aware of the risks and potential impacts, the next step is to identify the systems and functions that are critical to an organization. This overview can be used to ensure that these systems are prioritized for protection and recovery. When developing the individual business continuity plan, mapping the network, hardware and software topology, as well as their interdependencies, can help locate and fix problems early on to speed recovery.

4. reliable data backup

Even if a company already backs up its data reliably, risk assessment and analysis of potential impacts should form the basis for choosing the most effective backup strategy. One proven strategy is the 3-2-1-1 backup rule. This calls for keeping three backup copies of data on two different media - for example, hard disk and tape - with at least one copy in the cloud or secure storage and one copy in immutable storage.

5. recovery plan

Every business continuity plan should include a disaster recovery (DR) plan. This plan should take into account the nature of the technologies needed to meet the previously defined RPOs and RTOs. It should also define the recovery strategy - from file-based recovery to virtual machine (VM) recovery and cloud-based recovery. With cloud-based backup and disaster recovery, for example, Arcserve Cloud Service ensures business continuity at all times, no matter what.

6. regular review of the business continuity plan

If you need to put a business continuity and disaster recovery plan into action, there is no time to waste. At the same time, it is important to then test this plan to ensure that it will work in the event of an emergency.

Conclusion

There's a lot to consider when developing a business continuity plan. When it comes to backup and disaster recovery, it pays to talk to an expert. Not only do they have extensive expertise, but they also know the platforms and solutions available on the market to help turn such plans into reality.

Author: 
René Claus is EMEA MSP Sales Director at Arcserve.