How To Ensure Business Continuity in the Midst of IT Disaster Recovery

Maintaining continuity when the worst happens is mission-critical for client trust, data safety, and business success. Nothing plunges credibility and effectiveness faster than spinning your wheels in chaos after an IT disaster.

Despite tested and robust security protocols, cyberattacks and relentless hackers are still an industry concern. Or nature can do her worst to your servers and network equipment, disrupting operations and access.

Those who remain steady throughout a disaster retain the trust and confidence of their clients, their data, and their team, despite IT breaches or leaks. Officially, this is known as business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR).

Restoring infrastructure, data, and systems following a disruptive event is only achieved with ironclad policies, tools, and procedures that light the way through a cyberattack or crisis.

The Importance of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

Business continuity and disaster recovery are two sides of an important coin. The terms are often used interchangeably, but they serve different goals during an IT disaster.

Business continuity prioritizes the ongoing operational functions of your business during a disaster, despite also managing any disruption. This involves communicating with vendors and partners, managing logistics, and ensuring delivery wherever possible.

This is also an opportunity to identify how your company truly functions when your primary systems and applications are compromised or offline.

Disaster recovery has a narrower, more technical focus that reveals the path to restoring your digital systems. Everything from fixing disrupted connections to restoring lost data and ensuring applications continue to perform as expected.

Establishing clear priorities for both business continuity and disaster recovery will help teams build effective workflows and stay productive despite disruptions.

Conduct Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

An effective recovery hinges on proper preparation before crisis hits, not in the heat of the moment. This may involve understanding how your business would be impacted should critical systems go down. Map critical functions and needs to identify which resources require top priority. A BIA will reveal which tools your teams are operationally dependent on and what productivity would look like when those tools are down.

Identify and prioritize critical business functions and the IT resources required to support them in the event of a disaster. This ensures recovery efforts are focused on the most vital systems first.

Perhaps more critically, a BIA will reveal how long you can continue to function before operations aren’t sustainable. Rank each one and spend your budget where it will have the greatest impact.

Define Recovery Objectives: RTO and RPO Targets

How quickly do you need to get back to normal operations? Establish these two benchmarks for your critical applications to establish measurable recovery goals:

• Recovery time objective (RTO): Determine how long your system can stay offline before impact is critical. This is your target timeline for recovery efforts.
• Recovery point objective (RPO): Measure how much information you can afford to lose (and what lives between your last backup and the system disruption). High-stakes environments would measure this in seconds, others in hours.

Build Redundancies and Backups for Infrastructure Restoration

Your degree of resilience is directly tied to the scope and efficacy of your safety nets. Redundancies, such as automated backups and failovers, keep operations moving forward without disruption should critical systems suddenly go down. Automatically triggered data lockdowns can preserve important data in the event of a breach.

The 3-2-1 strategy is the rule of thumb for backing up data:

• Three different sets of records
• Two different media types
• One duplicated at an off-site location

If one set is corrupted or one media type fails, the duplication and separation keep the other sets safe and ready to deploy as needed. With your data secure, you can get back to normal functionality much faster.

Establish Clear, Effective Communication Pathways

Communication is critical to business continuity. If communication is lost, you’re already dead in the water. The best-laid plans and the most qualified teams are rendered ineffective without secure, reliable communication and coordination efforts.

Ensure your plans include pathways and contingencies for communication. Keep internal teams and external partners apprised of the latest information, how long the outage should last, steps being taken to stay productive, and more.

Clients and stakeholders should also be kept in the loop to assure them of ongoing recovery processes and maintain trust. It may help to draft canned notifications for a disruption, with some customization relating to this specific incident.

Battle Test Your Recovery Plans

It’s important to practice your plans; until you do, they’re merely good ideas. The worst time to test your disaster recovery systems is during an actual breach or disruption.

Testing your recovery plan also gives team members the opportunity to review and test their roles during a disaster and be more prepared for a real-world event. Carve out time for practice runs into the yearly schedule to ensure readiness.

A few great recovery testing ideas include:

• A risk assessment checklist
• Tabletop exercises
• A playbook table read
• Q&A session
• Mock disaster recovery
• Parallel testing
• Switchover tests

Always check your own backups or conduct external penetration tests to identify any weaknesses before a disruption occurs. Discovering where you need to focus your efforts when you’re not in the midst of a crisis will help you establish business continuity workflows which are actually effective.

Security and System Restoration Are Critical

All tech systems can be exposed to cyberattacks, ransomware, and other digital threats at some level. Focusing solely on prevention and not system restoration can be detrimental to your business should an outage hit.

Immutable backups and data storage can address this issue by ensuring that, should a hacker gain access, they cannot change or delete any saved data. If this is not already in your disaster recovery planning and business continuity processes, it should be.

Security and recovery specialists should be familiar with working closely together. When it’s time to get systems back online, these two teams are the gatekeepers who prevent any reintroduction of the same security holes which already failed.

Meeting Data Protection Standards During Recovery

Because of the amount of sensitive data handled by most businesses — including credit card data or personally identifiable information (PII) — most companies are subject to various data laws and compliance standards. Industry-standard frameworks like ISO, CMMC, or HITRUST certification validate an organization’s security posture, confirming the systems meet high standards for protecting sensitive data.

Business Continuity in Disaster Recovery: Stay Resilient

We all know technical issues are inevitable, and we can’t always predict when or how they will come. Especially when faced with natural disasters you can’t prevent.

However, extended disruptions and the devastating fallout can be mitigated. Building strong, sustainable recovery steps into your recovery plans will help leaders support an infrastructure that’s resilient and ready for the future.