Disaster Recovery

About

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Dangers to your business can come from many different directions and take many different forms. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are essential components in making sure that your business operations continue when disruptive events happen. Briggs IT Services can help your business proactively prepare for those unknown occurrences, whether your company is in Katy, Cypress, Houston, or the surrounding areas.

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans help minimize risk so that a business can continue to operate with little or no disruption. Organizations without a BCDR plan will struggle to survive or recover from a major disaster. BCDR programs help companies reduce overall risk, get back up and running after an outage or disruption, and mitigate the risk of data loss and protect against damage to their reputation.

Even the best employees cannot be expected to know what to do when disaster strikes. What can happen if a company has no plan in place is that each employee responds in his or her way, which typically adds to the confusion. Having a well-documented business continuity plan in place and training employees to follow it helps everyone deal with events in an organized, safe way and leads to a timely recovery.

Primary and secondary contact points should be determined internally and externally. Something that may help is to create templates or prewritten communications as well as communications schedules that can be deployed immediately in the event of an emergency. This helps put plans into action and address employee and public concerns.

Any unplanned interruption of normal business operations can create huge problems and result in costly setbacks. While your company’s operations may suffer, the resultant revenue loss may be greater. And those unplanned interruptions can take many forms, from something as simple as a power outage to a tornado, hurricane, cyber attack, or flood. Ultimately, a disaster can be anything that disrupts normal business operations. With a business continuity plan in place, you position yourself to minimize the impact and damage of an unexpected event.

A business continuity plan provides a business the ability to maintain essential operations and processes before, during, and after a disaster. It differs from disaster recovery in its across-the-board approach to the business and is a business-wide implementation plan to ensure the continuation of critical business functions should a disruptive event occur. On the other hand, disaster recovery deals with the
“recovery” of a company’s hardware, applications, and data after a technology disruption. A business’s employees and customers need continued access to critical systems, regardless of whether there is an unexpected weather event, systems get hacked, or there’s a critical technology outage. They are unable to complete their business without that access. It’s critical to have plans in place for how the business will operate remotely or failsafe solutions that respond quickly to keep applications online and data accessible when primary systems fail.