Disaster Recovery

What’s the difference between a Disaster Recovery Plan and a Business Continuity Plan?

You’ve probably heard both these terms before, but it’s worth explaining the difference since they’re sometimes confused.

 

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) focuses on how to keep all your company’s key business operations running in the event of a disaster – i.e. how you’d be able to keep producing and delivering services and products to your clients and customers. So, everything from keeping products dry, working from home arrangements, communicating with staff and keeping vehicles on the road, to ensuring vital documents are kept in fireproof safes.

A Disaster Recovery Plan, on the other hand, outlines the steps you’d need to take to specifically get your technology infrastructure up and running again after a disaster.

So essentially, a DRP is part of your wider Business Continuity Plan: both are essential, and both demand careful consideration of what data your business has, which files are most important, and how long you could wait before any IT downtime would start to have a major impact on your business.

Disaster Recovery in London

Developing a Disaster Recovery and/or Business Continuity Plan can be daunting.

But don’t worry – we’ll guide you through every step of the process and help you to come up with a robust plan that meets the particular needs of your business — in a cost effective way.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the past point that you’re able to recover data from. We’ll help you identify if you can afford to lose a week’s worth of data, a day’s worth, or only an hour.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the point in the future when you’ll be up and running again. You’ll want to consider if you need your team up and running quickly, within a couple of hours, or whether a day is enough.

Servers – Consider bringing an off-site replica of your main server to another location so your team could work there, or from home. Although whenever possible we recommend cloud services — and cloud backup services — over physical servers, in some cases physical servers are still a necessity and sometimes the best option for your operating model.

Hardware – Working out how quickly you’d need to replace hardware, or maybe even have spare hardware onsite that can be swapped in if something fails.

Insurance requirements – Ensuring that you have up-to-date documentation, like software licenses and an asset list for your insurance claim; helping you gain Cyber Essentials certification as many insurance companies now require this; And making sure that you have sufficient insurance cover for the value of your IT.

We’ll document all your key processes, run regular tests to make sure they work, and make sure everything stays up to date. And if you don’t already have an efficient data backup services in place – or simply want to upgrade it – we can set that up for you too.

For more info on how we can help your business with a disaster recovery solution, just get in touch.

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