Understanding the essentials of BCDR and backup is vital for minimising the impact of unplanned downtime on any business. Most businesses recognise that downtime can immediately result in lost revenue as staff are unable to engage with clients, payments get delayed, projects derailed, and clients go elsewhere.
Downtime can undermine employee productivity, destroy data, and halt business processes but unfortunately, natural disasters, human error, security breaches, and ransomware attacks are commonplace. All of which can jeopardise the availability of IT resources.
Every business, from the multi-national corporation to the brand new start-up must have an effective business continuity and disaster recovery plan (BCDR) in place if they are to remain protected from the damaging effects of unplanned downtime.
Backup vs BCDR – What is the difference?
There is an important distinction between backup and BCDR:
Backup is simply making an extra copy (or multiple copies) of data. Backup allows you to retain data. Nothing more.
BCDR, on the other hand, refers to the contingency plans a business puts in place to quickly re-establish access to applications, data, and IT resources following an outage. BCDR concerns itself with the practicalities of keeping a business running while systems are brought back online. That plan might involve switching to a redundant set of servers and storage system why the main data centre is brought back online. It might mean working from home as we have seen during the recent pandemic. Remote working poses its own unique cybersecurity questions as users will be beyond the bounds of the firewall, anti-virus and other protections businesses usually put in place. This must be accounted for in the business continuity plan.
How important is BCDR?
In one word, vital.
If it takes several hours to get your systems back online then you are talking about lost revenue as overheads remain, employees are being paid but are not able to work, customer interactions are impeded, and business process are ground to a halt. If it takes days to get back online, then you face the very real Possibility of losing custom to your competitors.
Most businesses are completely unaware of the true cost of downtime in terms of lost revenue. During the proof-of-concept phase of any BCDR plan we recommend, we provide a real-world impact assessment of business downtime, including the true financial cost to the business.
The Unity Metrix Solution
At Unity Metrix we believe that security loves simplicity. As an IT security services provider, we provide fully scalable systems that are suitable for small business and large corporations alike.
A combination of on-premises and cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions provide data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity for local, virtual, and cloud environments, within a single platform. The platform provides verified backups, administrator-defined restore options for any context, instant virtualisation, and ransomware protection, backed up into a private cloud.
No matter the requirement or size of the deployment we provide a comprehensive, scalable system for any business. Combined with our IT security certifications pathway, automated vulnerability
scanning and authentication services, Unity Metrix can provide a fully managed security ecosystem solution.
If your business is looking for experts in IT security services, contact us today for a quote.
