Business continuity is the ability to keep your core business functions running during and after a disruption, whether that is a ransomware attack, a hardware failure, a power outage, or a natural disaster.
Business continuity vs disaster recovery
These terms are related but different. Disaster recovery is about restoring systems after something fails. Business continuity is broader: it covers how your business operates while recovery is happening. The goal of BC is to minimize downtime, not just to eventually get back to normal.
A business with only a disaster recovery plan can get its data back. A business with a business continuity plan can keep serving customers while that recovery is happening.
Key components of a business continuity plan
Recovery time objective (RTO)
How quickly you need systems restored. An e-commerce business might require 2-hour RTO. A professional services firm might tolerate 24 hours.
Recovery point objective (RPO)
How much data loss is acceptable. If your RPO is 4 hours, backups must run at least every 4 hours.
Tested backups
A backup that has never been restored is not a reliable backup. Testing is what separates a plan from a hope.
Communication plan
Who gets notified, in what order, and through what channel when an incident occurs.
Temporary workarounds
What can staff do manually while systems are down? Which operations are truly mission-critical vs which can pause?
What skipping it actually costs
The average cost of IT downtime for a small business is estimated at $1,500 to $5,000 per hour, factoring in lost productivity, missed revenue, and recovery labor. A one-day outage from a ransomware attack can cost more than an entire year of managed IT services.
Business continuity planning is not expensive relative to the risk it mitigates. The businesses that skip it are betting that nothing will go wrong. That is a bet most end up losing eventually.
EagleOnyx builds and manages backup and disaster recovery for Central Florida businesses.
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