How to Build a Responsive Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Plan

In the next few years, most businesses will experience some sort of malware attack, business email compromise, or brand spoofing campaign. While you can't predict when these threats will strike, you can prepare your business to minimize downtime and interruptions to your customer service. One of the best ways to do so, is by creating a thorough Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan. Naturally, these plans will differ slightly from business to business, but there are general best-practices to include in each. 

Here Are Our Four Recommendations for BCDR Planning:

How to Develop a Company BCDR Plan

The best BCDR plans include operational and technical processes to help organizations recover data quickly in the event of a disruption. These disruptions can range from natural disasters to cyber attacks to end-user error. Regardless of the source, downtime can quickly add up in lost revenue and employee productivity. Having a BCDR plan in place helps your business:

• Protect business-critical data safe from malicious cyber-attacks and ransomware
• Quickly restore business services and recover data if an incident occurs
• Stay up and running to meet your customers' and employees' needs
  
  

Having a strong BCDR plan allows for improved resilience, flexibility, and redundancy in keeping your business operational. Each business's needs are unique, but having a BCDR solution that contains the following areas is strongly recommended to help maximize effectiveness: 

1. Multi-cloud redundancy
   
   • By  backing up and recovering workloads in a separate cloud, you can ensure that you will have uptime during downtime scenarios such as public cloud outages. 
2. Ransomware protection and prevention 
   
   • Cyber threats are growing in complexity and frequency. Having multi-cloud backups allows you to recover server workloads to minimize disruption following a ransomware attack. 
3. Rapid restore capabilities 
   • One of the most important things after a disruption is resuming business as quickly as possible in order to avoid losing revenue and customer satisfaction. Backup solutions allow your IT team to restore company devices quickly, and at scale. 
4. Image-based backup
   • Ensure that all of your data is saved and up to date by using an image-based solution. iCorps SaaS Protect captures thrice daily images of your data and covers OneDrive, SharePoint Online, mail, contacts, and calendar. 

Backing Up Your Azure Cloud Data

Many Microsoft 365 customers are under the impression that they don't need to backup their business data. The assumption is that their cloud data is automatically backed up. This isn't the case. Microsoft has a Shared Responsibility Model, wherein customers agree to share responsibility for the security of their own data. One of the best ways to ensure your cloud data is secured is to implement a BCDR solution. By switching to a cloud-based recovery solution, you can decrease reliance on vulnerable on-premise servers. These in-premise backup solutions may not be up to date, or patched against the newest exploits. Backup solutions can also work along side monitoring solutions such as SOC-as-a-Service, providing your IT team a clear view into your network health and performance. If you want to talk to an expert about BCDR plans, schedule a free IT consultation!