Planning for worst-case scenarios will ensure continuity for businesses, says Shawn Massey, Vice President Sales, Americas at Arcserve.
In today’s volatile cybersecurity environment, not having an effective business continuity plan with robust disaster recovery strategies can be devastating for companies of all sizes.
The landscape of potential threats is vast, ranging from cyber-criminals constantly seeking to exploit vulnerabilities, to natural disasters like earthquakes, floods and fires that can strike without warning.
Without a comprehensive and well-tested plan, a business’ ability to recover efficiently from disruptions diminishes with each passing minute, making the difference between a minor setback and catastrophic loss.
Preparing for the worst possible outcomes from scenarios is not just smart, but essential for business survival.
A recent survey from Uptime Intelligence shed light on the severe financial impact of unplanned outages, with 45% of respondents from businesses reporting losses ranging from $100,000 to $1 million per incident.
This underscores the critical need for organizations to develop and maintain a business continuity plan; one that not only mitigates downtime but can also preserve customer trust and safeguard a company’s reputation.
I’ve witnessed the repercussions of inadequate disaster recovery testing firsthand.
In a previous job, I oversaw a range of hosted and managed solutions and services from websites, email, application hosting and colocation.
One night, we faced a catastrophic event: a fire that caused a complete data loss.
Although we had a disaster recovery plan in place, it had never been tested.
Consequently, our recovery process took eight days.
Had we conducted regular testing, we could have identified and resolved many of the issues beforehand, potentially reducing our downtime by five to six days.
This is a prime example of why you need to not only have a plan, but to rigorously test and update it.
It can’t be overstated how much business continuity hinges on meticulous planning and understanding the specific needs and critical data of your organization.
Your plan should be built on the foundation of data resilience, which our Arcserve team categorizes into three primary pillars:
While there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to data protection, you should place a premium on data resilience by strengthening recovery strategies, backup systems and immutable storage solutions to prevent the loss of mission-critical data.
While business continuity planning heavily involves the IT area, all critical departments are required to provide substantive information and involvement in the process.
To this end, the first step in developing a business continuity plan (BCP) is to obtain full leadership buy-in and a directive to proceed.
Without this endorsement/directive, a fully effective BCP will be diminished.
Business continuity is an organizational concern, not just an IT concern.
Creating an effective BCP involves several key steps, starting with understanding the intrinsic value of your organization’s data.
The business impact analysis (BIA) exercise helps identify critical business functions and prioritize restoration efforts.
This analysis forms the cornerstone of any disaster recovery or business continuity strategy, ensuring that the most essential components of your business are prioritized in the event of a disruption.
A comprehensive BIA involves evaluating the potential impacts of various disruption scenarios on your business operations.
This includes assessing the financial, operational and reputational impacts.
The BIA helps in identifying critical business functions, the interdependencies between these functions and the resources required to support them.
It also establishes the maximum tolerable period of disruption for each function, which is critical in setting your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).
These are fundamental components of every business continuity plan.
The RTO is the maximum acceptable length of time that your business can be offline before it impacts operations significantly.
The RPO, on the other hand, defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time.
These objectives guide the selection of appropriate technologies and processes to ensure that your business can recover within acceptable limits.
A BCP is only as good as its implementation and regular testing.
Regularly scheduled drills and simulations help identify gaps and areas for improvement, ensuring that the plan remains effective over time.
Testing should include a variety of scenarios, from minor disruptions to major disasters, to prepare the organization for any eventuality.
Feedback from these tests should be used to refine and enhance the plan continuously.
Testing of all scenarios is crucial. It is not just the restoration of data; it is about making that data accessible to those that need to access it.
An often-overlooked aspect of business continuity planning is employee training and awareness.
Ensuring that all employees are aware of their roles and responsibilities during a disruption is critical for the effective execution of the plan.
Regular training sessions and awareness programs can help employees understand the importance of business continuity and their role in maintaining it.Â
I remember working with a customer, a distributor of eyeglass lenses, who had a clear vision of his business continuity needs.
Recognizing the highly commoditized nature of his business, he knew that failing to fulfill orders promptly would drive customers to competitors, making it difficult to win them back.Â
With a deep understanding of the value of business continuity planning, his RTOs/RPOs guided the approach needed for protection.
He bought a generator, secured redundant internet connections from different internet service providers (ISPs) to maintain connectivity, deployed high availability solutions for critical systems, like his electronic data interchange (EDI) server and invested in a robust and flexible data protection solution.Â
Ultimately, to be effective, an organization needs to evaluate the business processes in a 360-degree view, focusing on the risks that prevent the business from functioning.
Once accomplished and mitigated, it allows that organization to be more resilient and in the case of this story of the distributor, a greatly reduced opportunity for disruption, which then protects the business from negative outcomes.
Storage capacity, recovery timeline and configuration complexity can all contribute to the cost of various solutions.
In many cases, businesses are forced to choose between one with fast recovery times that may lose days of data or one that maintains system availability but drains both time and money.Â
A good disaster recovery solution should back up your data on your schedule to the locations of your choice.
It should also be easy to test, which is the only way to validate that RTOs/RPOs can be met.
Unfortunately, this is where many solutions fall short.
You must be able to recover your data every time and on time.
When disaster strikes, you want to be confident you can recover your data and get on with business as soon as possible.
The stakes are high and the risks are real – which is why preparedness must be an ongoing commitment to resilience and continuity, not just a one-time effort.
By understanding the value of their data, conducting thorough impact analyses and investing in robust data resilience strategies, businesses can safeguard operations against both anticipated and unforeseen threats, and build a resilient foundation that supports long-term success and stability.
This article was originally published in the July edition of Security Journal Americas. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.