4 Burning Questions on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

In this day and age, disaster has many forms. Organizations must prepare for a plethora of events that could disrupt the flow of business like natural disasters, cyberattacks, or even key employees exiting the business.

In a recent webinar, our experts broke down four pressing questions related to business continuity needs and the mitigation of the effects of a disaster. But first, what is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Explained

Business Continuity is simply the high-level plan your organization has in place for the business to continue to run smoothly. This needs to be in place to ensure that the key products and services the business delivers to its customers and members remain available.

Check out our expert vCIO discuss Disaster Recovery in the clip below.

Why do we need to have this conversation?

Over the past year, the risk landscape has grown dramatically. There was an increase in cybersecurity attacks, intrusion attempts and ransomware attacks across every industry. Organizations face financial, reputational, and compliance repercussions when not properly prepared for business continuity and disaster recovery. Analyzing your risk and being prepared to mitigate damage is a must.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into the 4 questions we will cover.  

What are some of the latest BCDR best practices?

Our expert vCIO breaks down one of the best practices.

Another BCDR best practice is being able to control your disaster recovery via a cloud service. Adoption of disaster recovery as a service (DRAS), has increased significantly over the past year. 25% of organizations in 2020 were using cloud models for their disaster recovery. In 2021, that number grew to around 58% of organizations, more than doubling.

The last two years, we’ve seen an increase in adoption of multi-cloud strategy. Let’s break that down.

How Can BCDR planning help us recover from ransomware, malware, or other cyberattacks?

You can prioritize your business’ BCDR strategy moving forward and what you specifically put into it to account for something like ransomware, malware, or cybersecurity attack, by taking a risk-based approach and understanding what your impact is.

One of the key components is the security incident response process. Let’s hear from our expert again.

How should businesses approach budgeting and prioritizing for BCDR initiatives?  

As always, it’s important to look at the organization’s goals to assess where to properly allocate the budget. Disaster recovery gives you a plan of action for when something goes wrong,  and it also assesses what part of the business needs the most security.

Listen to one of our expert vCIOs speak on physical infrastructure vs cloud solutions when it comes to budget:

How do I plan for key person dependency and risk?

The job market has changed drastically over the past 12 months and organizations are losing people with key institutional knowledge. If the business is not properly prepared for a key person’s exit, it can cause a ripple effect organization-wide. Watch our expert vCIO dive into some ways to plan:

Outsourcing is a great solution because you are replacing one key person with an entire team that is already cross-trained in all the functions you need to be serviced. As our experts put it, why rely on one person when you can get a whole team for the same cost to do it for you?

Summary

Now more than ever, it’s important to assess the risks your organization could face. Whether your biggest risk is compliance, an application outage, or anything else, outsourcing your IT and having a risk-benefit analysis is critical in maximizing your dollar.

Feel free to watch our full webinar, covering Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery below.