BCDR Planning and Its Importance for Your Business

What Is BCDR?

Business continuity refers to a company’s ability to recover from an event that causes disruption. This is vital for any organization. A business continuity plan can help prevent significant losses and ensure that operations return to normal as soon as possible in the event of a disaster. A BCDR plan designed by niche service providers such as IT Support Houston also minimizes downtime so that you can continue providing your services to customers during a disaster or outage. The Business Continuity (BC) aspect of Disaster Recovery (DR) refers to the processes for preparing for and responding to sudden disasters. These include those carried out before, during, and after the incident to ensure that the company can continue operating its business functions without interruption. Business continuity also involves all aspects of an organization—its staff members, buildings, business partners, etc. Unlike Business Continuity (BC), Disaster Recovery (DR) is primarily concerned with restoring computer systems and applications after a disaster has occurred.

Disaster recovery is getting more expensive for businesses, and business continuity is no longer guaranteed. Within just three years, between 2018-2020, 50 disaster events resulted in $237.2 billion in damages in the U.S. alone. 2021 was another rough year with 20 disaster events that resulted in over $1 billion in damages. The average cost of a single hour of downtime is now over $1 million for nearly 44% of enterprises. Experts estimate that downtime costs have increased 32% in the past 7 years. With rising ransomware attacks, companies are experiencing more downtimes than ever, with the average downtime from ransomware attacks ranging around 16.2 days. Add to this; the NOAA/NCEI data estimates that 2021 was also one of the busiest years for climate disasters. Despite all the sobering statistics, FEMA estimates that 75% of SMBs do not have a disaster recovery plan.

Why Is BCDR Important?

Improved Business Resilience

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans help businesses survive a disaster. Without a strategy, you risk sinking into oblivion if the worst happens. Wide-scale disasters happen more often than we like to admit. In 2019, 45% of businesses had a pandemic response prepared as part of their business continuity plans. This means more than half of all companies were left vulnerable to the pandemic’s catastrophic effects. Effective Business continuity and disaster recovery planning from experienced service providers like IT Consulting Houston help businesses prepare for unplanned incidents. In cases of severe disasters, without a proper strategy, a company might never recover. As a business owner, you need to take a hard look at your preparedness and ask yourself if you are willing to suffer the consequences of being overwhelmed or caught unawares.

Lower Downtime

A Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan can help you minimize the time your services are down in the event of a disaster or outage. This is because having one in place means you can get your most essential services back up and running as soon as possible, helping keep your business running smoothly.

Better Employee Safety

As a business, one of your chief priorities should be the safety of your employees. To ensure this, you should have a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan. The plan should include procedures for evacuating employees safely, as well as providing critical services or support if a natural disaster strikes your premises or employees’ homes.

Secure Sensitive Information

Failure to create regular backups of your data, accidental deletion of files, or disruption of the network resulting from cyberattacks can have serious consequences. Most cases of significant data loss can be traced back to human error, cyberattacks, or server outages. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plans help you stay compliant with data security and privacy laws by ensuring that you have the proper measures in place to protect your data, as well as the ability to recover it if needed.

Empower Employees

Creating and testing business continuity and disaster recovery plan will help your employees know how to behave in the event of a disaster, what their roles and responsibilities are, and what objectives they are expected to aim for to return service to an average level. A surprising number of employees are underprepared for disaster. A recent study uncovered that 16% of SMB executives did not know their recovery time objectives (RTOs)—even though 24% expect to recover data in less than 10 minutes if disaster strikes. Regularly testing your plan is also a critical component of BCDR planning. If your employees know how to act accordingly during a disaster, they can restore your services as quickly as possible. Disaster Recovery Houston can help local businesses implement practical employee training in disaster recovery.

Ensure Regulatory Compliance

Organizations in the health and finance industries, among others, must comply with laws and regulations mandating disaster recovery planning. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act (HIPAA) requires hospitals to have data backup and disaster recovery plans and can levy steep fines for non-compliance. In addition, FINRA and PCI DSS Requirement 12.10.1 need organizations to have robust plans laid out to maintain compliance.

About Scott Young:

Scott Young is the president of PennComp LLC; a managed IT Services Houston company. Being a CPA, Six Sigma Master Blackbelt, Change Management Certified, and Myers Briggs Qualified, Scott’s expertise is reflected in PennComp as a leading IT company for computer services and network integration. PennComp utilizes Six Sigma methodologies and practices in their service delivery and offers their clients state-of-the-art monitoring and management tools.