No matter the industry, you need a business continuity plan!
BLT? BEC? No Sandwiches here—just smart planning!
Acronyms abound, but don’t worry: BDR is a useful one. It stands for Backup and Disaster Recovery, and it’s a necessary aspect of your business plan. Unless you’re off the grid completely, your company likely has a lot invested in your digital presence, from day-to-day operations to data storage.
Backing up your data and having a Disaster Recovery strategy in place when something goes wrong are crucial steps to take in this digitally driven world.
Why is a BDR plan important?
A BDR plan is a broadly applicable, top-down look at what could happen to your data, and what you can do to mitigate negative consequences.
In this day and age, it’s not about “if” you need a BDR plan—it’s about when you’ll need it.
There are many ways your data and ability to access it might be negatively affected: by a flood that damages your equipment, a power outage, or one of the many forms of cyberattack that are plaguing small and mid-sized businesses. When creating a BDR, we’ll help you consider all angles.
So, what’s the benefit?
Whether the IT disaster is related to an employee accidentally deleting an important document or to compromised credentials being the entry point for a ransomware attack, there are plenty of worst-case scenarios.
Some research has shown that up to 93% of companies that experienced some kind of data disaster and didn’t have a BDR plan in place, went out of business within one year. Yikes!
Fortunately, there are also some folks who are “doing it right”—and you can be one of them! Take for example Ballistic Echo, a software development firm that experienced a major human-error-related disaster, where thousands of lines of code were deleted. In the past, it would have meant irrevocable damage, but thanks to their well-constructed BDR plan and frequent backups, they were able to recover the data in mere minutes: a best-case scenario.
Most businesses have been impacted by the pandemic in some way. Many companies expanded their online presence, but did so in a hurry, without thinking about loopholes and security vulnerabilities. As we move forward in 2022, now is the perfect time to reexamine your existing online defenses, and build a strong BDR plan.
