On our last post, we presented the 5 reasons your organization should have a Business Continuity Plan. On that article, we explained that anyone failing to plan for the aftermath of a ransomware attack o other disaster is asking for trouble. When you consider the number of companies that fail to re-open when they are seriously impacted by such events, it isn’t a good idea to neglect business continuity.

See below the top trends in the business continuity market:

Despite all the talk about malware bringing companies to their knees and warnings about extreme weather events, most organizations still do not bother with Business Continuity. According to a Mercer report, 51% of companies were caught off guard when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, as they did not have a business continuity plan to combat this unexpected event.
Thus, many businesses tend to put their heads in the sand with regard to future eventualities. Many still wait until they suffer an attack or disruption before they take steps to prevent it. It appears that they believe such things will never happen to them — until they do actually happen to them

Another trend is to fail to differentiate between the different types of plans for major events. While terms like disaster recovery and business continuity are often used interchangeably, there are important differences.

Business Continuity Plan: refers to how a business continues to operate when key systems are down, or an outage occurs. A business continuity plan is a must-have for every organization and keeps a business running effectively, even when faced with an unexpected disaster or tumultuous times.

Disaster Recovery Plan: refers to how specific platforms, data, and applications are restored following a cyber-attack, disaster, or other failures. In essence, a disaster recovery plan refers to the specific part of the business continuity plan to be followed during and after data loss.

As companies become increasingly reliant on critical applications for their core business functions, more IT teams are incorporating more business continuity planning into their development projects. In other words, the smart businesses are not creating BC features and plans after the effect. They build their applications, establish their IT infrastructure – and then they begin to think about BC.

The old standard used to be to restore data in systems in a day or two. But gradually, the time factor has been brought down. Now there is little tolerance at all for any delay between system failure and recovery. Organizations are implementing high-availability solutions that automatically restore application operations in minutes.

Electrical outages might strike one neighborhood, an entire town, or rarely, an entire region. Other disasters typically have geographic limitations that can be predicted. Those companies wishing to recover effectively and fast from a disaster should take care that there is enough geographic separation between their locations, typically over a wide area network (WAN).


This article was originally published in the Enterprise Storage Forum.

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