??Business??Continuity and??Disaster???Recovery (BCDR) Essentials

Data Loss Disasters Come in Many Forms

Data loss disasters come in many forms, ranging from full-scale natural calamities to cyberattacks and even simple human errors. Disasters can bring businesses to a grinding halt. Apart from financial and reputational damage, failing to protect valuable data can also result in expensive lawsuits.

That's why businesses, regardless of size, must have a backup and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan. By implementing a foolproof BCDR, you can quickly get your business back up and running should disaster strike. It will also help you comply with governmental and industry regulatory frameworks.

In this post, we’ll break down the different types of data loss disasters and outline the key BCDR components that can help you make it through a disruptive event with flying colors.

The many forms data loss can take

Let's analyze the various types of data loss disasters that can hurt your business:

Natural disasters????????

This covers everything from storms, hurricanes, floods, fires, tsunamis, and volcano eruptions. In most cases, you can expect infrastructural damages, power failures, and mechanical failures, which could then lead to data loss.

Hardware and software failure????????

Software and hardware disruption can cause data loss if you don't have BCDR measures in place. These disruptions could be due to bugs, glitches, configuration errors, programmatic errors, component failures, or simply because the device is at its end of life or the software is outdated.

Unforeseen circumstances?????♀??????

Data loss can happen due to random, unexpected scenarios. For instance, a portable hard disk held by an employee could get stolen, your server room may have a water leak because of a plumbing issue, or there could even be a pest infestation in one of your data centers.

Human factor??????

Human errors are a leading cause of data loss incidents. These errors range from accidental file deletions, overwriting of existing files, and naming convention errors to forgetting to save or back up data or spilling liquid on a storage device.

Cyber threats????????

Your business may fall prey to malware, ransomware, and virus attacks, which could leave your data and backups corrupt and irrecoverable. Additionally, data loss could be caused by malicious insiders with unauthorized access, which often goes under the radar.

Key components of BCDR

Here are a few crucial things to keep in mind as you build a robust BCDR strategy:

• Risk assessment - Identify potential risks and threats that would impact business operations. Measure and quantify the risks to tackle them.?????????????????????????
• Business impact analysis (BIA) - Assess the potential consequences of a disruptive event on critical business functions and prioritize them in the recovery plan.
• Continuity planning - Implement procedures to resume critical business operations during disruption, with minimal downtime. ?
• Disaster recovery planning - Plan a well-defined business resumption plan to recover critical IT functions and data following a disruptive incident.
• Testing and maintenance - Periodically test your disaster recovery and backup plans to ensure they can be recovered in a disaster. If they fail, you can work on the enhancement.

Being proactive and preparing for potential disasters can greatly mitigate their impact, help ensure a smoother recovery process, or may even prevent it from happening. That's why we've prepared a Disaster Recovery Checklist for you to stay one step ahead, click the photo below to download the checklist:

Why Your Business Needs a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan?

Even on a good day, being a business owner is challenging. Apart from dealing with and effectively solving multiple problems, you also need the foresight to arm your business with the right tools and solutions to tackle any issues that might arise later. One issue you should always prioritize is data loss/data corruption and business disruption that cause downtime and productivity dips.

Adopting a comprehensive backup and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy is the best way to tackle this problem.

What is a comprehensive backup and BCDR strategy?

A comprehensive backup and BCDR strategy emphasizes the need for various technologies working together to deliver uptime. It even highlights technologies associated with cybersecurity. A robust strategy:

? Protects all systems, devices, and workloads

Managing all systems, devices, and workloads efficiently, securely, and consistently can be challenging. Mistakes, errors, mishaps, and outright failures across backup and recovery systems could happen at any time, leading to severe downtime or other costly business consequences. That’s why it’s essential to have a reliable and secure solution to back up and protect business data as well as business systems, devices, and workloads.

? Ensures the integrity, availability, and accessibility of data

The complexity of IT, network, and data environments, including multiple sites — cloud, on-premises, and remote — makes monitoring and protection difficult. It negatively affects the integrity, availability, and accessibility of information and all IT network assets. That’s why it’s a best practice to simultaneously deploy tools or systems that cover all IT and network infrastructure (remote, cloud, and on-site) with the same level of protection and security.

? Enables business resilience and continuity

A comprehensive and realistically achievable backup and BCDR strategy prioritizes, facilitates, and ensures the continuity of business operations. It represents a business’ resiliency against downtime or data loss incidents.?

? Prioritizes critical protection and security requirements against internal and external risks

No backup or BCDR solution can be effective if your business does not proactively identify and mitigate internal and external risks. You need tools that focus on internal and external threats through constant monitoring, alerting, and tactical defense to empower your backup and BCDR strategy.

? Optimizes and reduces storage needs and costs through deduplication

With the amount of data skyrocketing day after day, it poses serious storage and budgetary challenges for businesses. What makes things worse is the existence of multiple unnecessary copies of the same files. Therefore, adopting the deduplication process can identify data repetition and ensure that no similar data is stored unnecessarily.

? Manages visibility and unauthorized access and fulfills data retention requirements

Your business data must never be visible to every employee in the same way. There must be policies and tools to ensure that an employee accesses only data essential to completing their tasks. Also, unauthorized access must be identified and blocked immediately. This is crucial not only for the success of backups and BCDR but also for maintaining compliance with all regulatory mandates related to data protection and retention.

Comprehensive backup and BCDR for your business

Big-picture threats don’t have seasons and neither should BCDR.

Sudden disruptions can damage your business at any time and adopting a comprehensive backup and BCDR strategy is not an option but a necessity. You must do everything possible to bring all the right tools and strategies together so your business can operate seamlessly and deliver reliable uptime, even in the face of chaos.

Here's another checklist to help you build a solid BCDR strategy:

Remember, even if 20% of your business-sensitive files are unrecoverable, it could spell disaster.

Complete BCDR coverage means all business-critical elements of your business are proactively protected, backed up, and 100% recoverable if your defenses are ever breached.

Strengthen your business’s BCDR strategy before it’s too late.

It isn’t as difficult as you might think. Collaborate with an expert partner like Fothion with the knowledge and experience to take care of your backup and BCDR needs.

Get in touch with us today to learn more.

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