What is business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR)?

Posted:

10/07/2024

| By:

Jim Peterson

Cyberattacks. Hurricanes. Wildfires. IT outages. Human errors.

These seemingly disparate events have one thing in common: they all underscore the importance of taking the right precautions to prepare for potential disasters. The US Federal Alliance for Safe Homes estimates that 40% of businesses don’t reopen after a disaster strikes, and another 25% fail within a year.

Mitigating the risk and effects of a disaster goes beyond ensuring you have sufficient insurance coverage. Since one in 10 small businesses suffer from natural disasters per year (setting aside other disasters or affected large enterprises), establishing a solid business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan may be vital to your company or client’s longevity.

But what is BCDR, exactly? And how might it enhance your overall risk management strategy?

Whether you’re an MSP searching for a BCDR solution or simply want to expand your offerings, below you’ll find the essential elements of this ever-crucial tactic.

Key components of BCDR

Business continuity and discovery recovery are risk management strategies used by businesses of all sizes. Put simply, business continuity refers to the ongoing planning and preparation stages that ensure readiness before disasters. In contrast, disaster recovery refers to the specific parts of those plans that will be executed following a significant incident.

Both elements are critical to a company’s strength and survival; they can help accelerate recovery and safeguard a business’s assets and reputation.

Thorough BCDR planning entails the following four components.

1. Risk assessment and business impact analysis (BIA)

A risk assessment and business impact analysis (BIA) predicts the potential damage a disaster (or human error) might cause and your company’s capacity to continue operating if an unforeseen circumstance occurs, such as a/an:

Natural disaster
Internet outage
Cybercrimes
Employee errors
Data corruption

This tactic initially focused on traditional disruptions—such as equipment failure, physical damage to headquarters, or power and access interruptions—but over the last decade, cybercrime has emerged as a significant risk.

Today, it plays a critical role in understanding potential impacts on your supply chain and the cost of downtime, making it an essential consideration for ensuring the continuous delivery of goods and services.

Additionally, a risk assessment and BIA aims to anticipate:

Impact of core system downtime (communications, operations, finance)
The maximum tolerable downtime for individual services (M365, phone systems, ERP, financial applications, etc.)
Customer dissatisfaction and/or attrition

2. Business continuity planning (BCP)

Business continuity planning outlines what gets your business up and running again during and after a disaster. In addition to creating contingency plans, this aspect of BCDR may also touch on:

Communication with teams, vendors, and clients
Core functions
Potential risks
Roles and responsibilities
Operation disruption strategies
Documentation and plan maintenance
Employee crisis management

Given the potential complexity of any business, it's critical to test your BCP consistently to ensure its effectiveness. This will help temper chaos and keep everyone’s eyes on what matters most: resuming business as usual.

3. Disaster recovery planning (DRP)

Disaster recovery planning (DRP) zeroes in on crafting IT resilience through processes and procedures that align the availability of technology services with specific business needs outlined in a BIA. This may include:

Creating detailed plans for restoring the availability of IT systems and data environments, services, access, and data
Detailed recovery requirements that match business needs, including RPO (recovery point objective), RTO (recovery time objective), and MDT (maximum tolerable downtime) per core function
A detailed data protection strategy is needed to protect all business information

Detailed processes for recovery include:

IT infrastructure (hardware/software/virtual/hosted)
Access to technology (network connectivity)
Access to applications (SaaS, Cloud, on-premises, etc.)
Testing and maintenance

Further, experts suggest performing regular inventories of your assets and their importance. This includes your business’s IT infrastructure, hardware, software, and anything else fundamental to your company’s operations.

4. Testing and maintenance of BCDR plans

A first-rate BCDR plan is not a set-it-and-forget endeavor. Rather, your BCP and DRP should be tested for efficacy, routinely examined, and kept up to date. Proper testing should include both tabletop exercise and a live test of BCDR services that are executed annually at minimum.

In both DR tests (tabletop and live), one critical component of BCDR success is ensuring lessons learned are applied. In the timeframe between DR tests, people, processes, technology, and business needs may have changed and must be reflected in the process for it to be effective.

Benefits of implementing BCDR strategies

Having an effective BCDR plan is a principal line of defense for businesses of all sizes. A few of the leading benefits of creating one include:

Significantly reduce the downtime impact of disasters or cybersecurity events
Alignment of business needs and recovery priorities
Bolstered organizational durability
Enhanced customer, vendor, and confidence

Additionally, BCDR fosters collaboration between IT (whether internal or through an MSP) and other core business teams, ensuring that solutions are protected at the level required by the business. This approach reduces the reliance on 'shadow' IT and helps eliminate the use of unsanctioned applications that may store unprotected, business-critical data.

Best practices for effective BCDR

Excellent BCDR begins and ends with communication in your organization. Ensuring your IT support (internal and/or MSP) and employees have a step-by-step plan to follow and are well-trained in handling a disaster will make an enormous difference in how quickly and well you respond to one.

An effective way to increase the efficiency of your BCDR plan is to look for specific technology solutions that speed up the identification of potential outages in your organization, thereby shirking the timeline for executing your plan.

AI-enabled security monitoring solutions include:

MDR or XDR
SIEM and SOC
Continuous vulnerability management
RPA solutions to help with automating recovery
Testing simulation services

Real-world examples of BCDR in action

To deepen your understanding of BCDR’s importance, consider the following examples.

Case studies of businesses that successfully implemented BCDR

At the start of January 2023, Denmark’s central bank was the target of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that halted operations for several hours and blocked access to two of the nation’s biggest private banks.

While they could resume business the same day, it spotlighted their vulnerabilities.

Earlier, in 2021, Ireland faced a similar crisis when its Health Service Executive (HSE) was hit by Conti ransomware, effectively bringing the healthcare system to a complete stop. As a result, it:

Caused IT outages at five hospitals
Forced HSE to shut down more than 85,000 computers and investigate 2,000-plus IT systems
Exposed the sensitive private data of thousands of people who had received the Covid-19 vaccine
Took four months to restore business functions (which occurred only because the cybercriminals released the decryption key)

Lessons learned and best practices from these examples

As the first example indicates, implementing robust safety protocols and a meticulous action plan is imperative to a financial institution’s reputation and integrity.

And for the second? As the HHS Cybersecurity Program reports, HSE did not have a cyberattack response plan in place, nor did they perform “typical” activities, like testing their system’s technical response. The lack of planning contributed to the attack’s severity and drawn-out recovery timeline.

The impact of BCDR on business recovery and resilience

BCDR stands as the antidote to these and other disasters. While we can’t always predict when a natural disaster, human error, or cyberattack will occur, we can predict how we will respond when they inevitably occur.

Solutions to support your BCDR strategy

Developing an effective BCDR plan can be challenging when an organization tries to do it without the help of a qualified MSP. They may not have the experience and tools to properly prepare, which can prove costly in the long run. That’s where your team can step in to become a partner organizations can trust.

Some solutions to scale your BCDR business include:

Helping clients fully recover and remain secure: Comprehensive BCDR services can help you support every level of your clients’ businesses, including their valuable data. With trusted backup solutions, you can guarantee against data loss, which isn’t provided by every backup service.
Providing BCDR services from a single vendor: While organizations can work with several vendors to create a BCDR plan, this can lead to silos and make recovery more cumbersome. You can better ensure business continuity by offering one solution to your clients.
Offering strategic outsourcing: Good BCDR solutions will offer outsourcing to a network operations center (NOC) to help manage your team’s tasks, like securing more endpoints, conducting routine tasks, and closing the skills gap. NOCs can keep costs more manageable for your clients and help you scale your MSP business with additional resources and offerings.

Comprehensive planning and preparation with ConnectWise

Recognizing the critical role of backup as the final line of defense in cybersecurity, we are committed to equipping MSPs with robust solutions that enhance their ability to safeguard valuable data. In pursuit of this objective, ConnectWise has acquired Axcient and SkyKick, pioneers in data protection, business continuity, and cloud backup software.

Get in touch today to learn more about how we can help you.

What are some common challenges businesses face when implementing BCDR plans?

Organizations trying to create a BCDR plan may find it challenging to:

Make planning a priority because of time and resource constraints.
Ensure the plan is comprehensive enough to protect their business.
Create the plan on their own because of the overwhelming amount of data and process to manage.

This gives MSPs the opportunity to offer solutions to these challenges, to help your clients be more prepared and secure.

How often should BCDR plans be reviewed and updated?

There is no set standard for how often a BCDR plan should be reviewed or updated. However, to ensure preparedness, it’s wise to do an annual review to account for any changes in your client’s business, like staffing, a new location, IT infrastructure, or regulatory guidelines.

What is the difference between hot, warm, and cold sites in BCDR planning?

Hot, warm, and cold sites represent different backup options. Hot sites contain copies of all data centers, including software and hardware, and are ready to go when needed, particularly for mission-critical operations. Cold sites don’t have server hardware or software and are reserved for a time when a disaster occurs and backups need to be done and are typically less expensive than running a hot site. A warm site offers basic equipment; however, you still need to load your data.