Developing a Business Continuity Plan and a Disaster Recovery Strategy

Business continuity plans (BCPs) and disaster recovery (DR) play crucial roles during business crises. Each plan ensures that your business can withstand and quickly recover from disruptive business events. The elements of a quality BCP and DR strategy include the following:

• Proactively conducting a business impact analysis (BIA) to identify critical business functions.
• Defining backup and recovery requirements.
• Assessing potential likelihood and impact.
• Conducting regular testing and training.

If you take on Mount Everest and hope to reach its 29,032-foot summit, you can expect to meet cold weather — as low as -76 F degrees — and hurricane-force winds. So, you prepare. You bring essentials like goose-down-filled, triple-layered garments; double-plastic climbing boots with altitude liners; an ice axe with a leash, and so on. It’s a long list of essential items to ensure you can continue to operate in the extreme situations that you foresee.

It's all about anticipation and preparedness. It’s the same mentality businesses should have when creating a continuity and recovery plan to ensure your business can continue to operate in the case of a cyberattack or natural disaster – including unexpected IT issues. If you’ve anticipated and planned for the worst, while hoping for the best, then you greatly increase your chances of success.

What is a business continuity plan and disaster recovery?

A business continuity plan, or BCP for short, is designed to maintain or restore critical business functions in the event of an unplanned disaster. It often focuses on sustaining the ability to perform critical processes even while you’re experiencing a degradation or outage. Notably, that ability often relies on key employees who have received training and understand how to follow documented processes even in challenging circumstances.

Disaster recovery, or DR for short, focuses on recovering your IT systems and data in a strategic approach to minimize the impact of unforeseen events such as natural disasters or cyberattacks. It involves planning and implementing measures to restore critical systems, data, and services after a disruptive event.

The components of business continuity and disaster recovery plans

As your financial partner, we work diligently to follow best practices to keep your financial data and accounts secure, but you play a crucial role in helping protect your and your customers’ information, as well. As you proactively plan for challenging circumstances, such as a cyberattack, it may be helpful to consider the following information.

Components of a business continuity plan

1. Perform a business impact analysis (BIA).
   • Outline critical functions, acceptable downtime, and recovery time objectives.
   • Think through how you’ll prioritize resources during disruptions.
   • Assess the impact of a potential disruption on critical functions and processes, including financial impact, customers and stakeholders, and reputational impact.
2. Develop a business continuity plan.
   • Outline strategies, roles, and responsibilities.
   • Include communication plans, available resources, and key employees.
   • Communicate with key employees who will lead recovery efforts and ensure they know how their role connects to the larger plan.
3. Promote redundancy.
   • Identify workarounds for your critical business processes. Are there other ways to complete those processes? Outlining alternate procedures and roles may help you meet the recovery time objectives you’ve outlined in your BIA.
   • This includes redundant systems, work locations, and employees.
   • Alternative resources and procedures should be well documented and trained.
4. Test your plan and train your employees.
   • Regularly test your BCP to ensure its effectiveness. You can do this through tabletop exercises. Create a potential scenario and walk through your plan to react during that scenario. Identify gaps and adjust your plan accordingly.
   • Prioritizing your systems can make testing more manageable. Test or review your critical systems more frequently.
   • Train your employees on their roles and responsibilities during emergencies.

Components of disaster recovery

1. Complete a risk assessment.
   • Identify critical business functions that rely on IT infrastructure and data availability.
   • Evaluate potential risks to your IT infrastructure and prioritize them based on impact and likelihood.
   • Recognize that critical business functions can significantly impact revenue, reputation, and regulatory compliance.
2. Build a DR plan.
   • Define roles and responsibilities for disaster recovery efforts; ensure key employees understand their tasks during a DR event.
   • Establish effective communication channels for emergencies.
   • Document a restoration plan aligned with business criticality.
3. Think about data backup and restoration.
   • Implement restoration procedures for critical IT functions or data in order of importance.
   • Regularly test backups to ensure effective restoration processes and update as needed.
   • Consider off-site or cloud-based backups.
4. Test your plan and train your employees.
   • Regularly test your DR plan to ensure its effectiveness. Identify any gaps.
   • Review and update risk assessments at least annually.
   • Train your employees on their roles and responsibilities during emergencies.

Why business continuity and disaster recovery matter

A BCP and DR help ensure you’re prepared to handle various disruptions to your business. It can help you avoid reputational damage, loss of revenue, or a decrease in employee safety. As your business grows and becomes more complex, the risk compounds, which is why ongoing planning is essential. Remember:

• A BCP ensures that your business can continue to operate under adverse conditions, minimizing operational downtime and maintaining customer trust.
• DR provides a safety net, ensuring that, even in the face of significant IT disruptions, your business will maintain access to IT systems.