Setting Your Business Up for Success: Business Continuity
If you’ve heard the term business continuity, you likely have a general idea of what it entails but may be unsure of how it’s related to disaster recovery or business continuity solutions. In this post, we’ll go over the fundamental of managing business continuity and cover related topics that have become buzzwords in the IT world today. Let’s get started.
Business Continuity Management
Fundamentally, business continuity management (BCM) provides the framework a business uses to identify and mitigate both internal and external organizational risks like a network failure or a fire. The end goal of an effective BCM is to ensure that your organization is prepared to respond to threats as quickly as possible while protecting your business interests. Businesses accomplish this goal by leveraging recovery strategies to ensure that they can continue operating even in the event of a disaster. BCM includes several related subfields including:
- Disaster recovery
- Business recovery
- Crisis management
- Incident management
- Emergency management
- Contingency planning
For IT purposes, we’re most concerned with disaster recovery and business recovery. Let’s examine each of these along with how an IT solution can take your preparations to the next level.
Disaster and Business Recovery
Disaster recovery primarily deals with security measures that aim to protect an organization in the event of a disaster so that they can maintain or quickly resume critical business functions. Thus, disaster recovery technology solutions include strategies like:
- A cloud-based productivity platform
- Redundant, automated cloud backups
- A network failover solution
In the event of a disaster, the more processes and data you have in the cloud, the better off you will be. Hardware can always be replaced; data can’t. If you’re looking for the ultimate in disaster recovery strategies, plan on moving a significant part of your operations to a cloud-based environment. Because cloud solutions typically utilize redundant resources from multiple data centers, your data will always be a click away in the event of a ransomware attack or natural disaster.
Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives
When we talk about disaster and business recovery, we consider two key factors: recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). RPO is used to describe the age of files that must be recovered from backup storage to resume normal operations. Depending on how your business uses data, this can range anywhere from several days to an hour. RTO, on the other hand, relates to the maximum allowable length of time that a computer, system, network, or application can be down after failure or disaster. RTO is typically measured in much shorter time frames like minutes or hours.
Want to learn more about how your business can stay prepared with a comprehensive business continuity plan? The experts at VTG are here to help. [Contact us today] for the peace of mind knowing you’ll be prepared for tomorrow.