Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR)

Business Continuity refers to a company’s ability to continue its core operations during and after a disaster which has affected their business. This is part of the larger field of disaster recovery.

Disaster recovery refers to the implementation of planned emergency measures during a business disaster to restore the company to a baseline level of operations. The business continuity part specifically refers to efforts to maintain core business operations during the actual disaster itself. A disaster in this context could mean a variety of scenarios including both physical disasters (office fire, flood, power cut) and digital disasters (data breaches, ransomware attacks). 

An example of effective business continuity would be as follows: 

A company may have its entire network replicated and backed-up to the cloud. In the event of a disaster making their office unreachable (for example a flood in the building makes it unsafe to enter for a time), staff working from home during the disaster can connect to virtualised a copy of their network running on a cloud service like Microsoft Azure. Although perhaps not as convenient or efficient as working from their office in the long-term, in the short-term it allows them to continue serving their customers and conducting business, thus their business has established continuity during the disaster recovery process.

Every business should have some form of a business continuity plan in place, but not every business will have the resources or budget to be able to perform all of their functions during the midst of a disaster. Therefore, the first step in creating an effective disaster recovery plan is to determine which functions of your business are essential and then work on a plan to maintain those within your set budget. 

If the ability to keep in contact customers and operate a helpdesk was your most important function then you would need to ensure that during a disaster you had a workable, cloud-based VoIP telecoms system in place that your staff could access from any device.