4 Reasons You Need Business Continuity Planning

Are you a CEO? If so, you probably care about Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR) for four undeniable reasons.

As a proactive CEO, you know that implementing a solid business continuity and disaster recovery plan, also referred to as BCDR, is essential for your business. After all, why would anyone in your esteemed position ever put a business at risk to downtime or data loss when prevention is so easy? While some negligent CEOs fail to give BCDR the proper attention it deserves, we’re not worried about you. But if anyone asks, here are four critical reasons that you, the CEO, care about business continuity and disaster recovery.

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4 major reasons CEOs care about BCDR include:

1. Downtime is really, really, expensive: If your employees or customers lose access to business-critical applications and data, there will be a direct impact on productivity and revenue. While this sounds obvious, many organizations do not consider the actual costs of downtime. Some modern BCDR products offer the ability to run applications from backup instances of virtual servers. This allows users to continue operations while primary application servers are restored. Choosing a BCDR solution aimed at reducing downtime makes good business sense.
2. Backup Alone = Not Enough! You’d be hard pressed to find a business today that doesn’t conduct some form of data backup. But, what happens if a flood wipes out your primary and backup servers? Sending a copy of data offsite for disaster recovery should also be considered essential. Historically, this meant sending tapes to a secondary location or tape vault. As previously mentioned, modern BCDR products can run applications from backup instances of virtual servers, and some can extend this capability to the cloud. This approach is frequently called cloud DR or disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). The ability to run applications in the cloud while onsite infrastructure is restored is widely considered to be a game changer for disaster recovery. As CEO, you don’t want yesterday’s backup technology. Backup and business continuity are not one in the same. Your business needs both – all the time.
3. Disasters actually do happen – and they most times are not natural! Not every disaster is broadcasted on news and weather channels. Most IT downtime is a result of common, every day actions like accidental (or even intentional) data deletion, damage to computer hardware and poor security habits. For example, a CompTIA study found that 94% of respondents routinely log into public wifi, in spite of security risks. And, 69% of this group accesses work-related data over public wifi. A ransomware attack or virus can halt operations just as easily as a tornado or a power surge. These disasters are typically a result of human error, which in unpreventable.
4. Business continuity impacts everybody – especially your customers! Data is essential for all types of organizations today, so ensuring access to applications and data following a disaster is critical. But it’s just one piece of the BCDR puzzle. Evaluating your business’ ability to restore IT operations can be a good starting point for company-wide business continuity efforts. Good BCDR planning should look at the business as a whole – with a goal to develop business resilience. In fact, many BCDR planning efforts start by conducting a business impact analysis or risk assessment—these studies can reveal weaknesses in your (yes your!) organization’s ability to continue operations that go far beyond IT.

Learn about CompuData’s expertise in Disaster Recovery!

Keep in mind, failure to protect your business from human error, hardware failure and/or natural disasters can be detrimental and impact every single stakeholder. Implementing a BCDR plan will help today’s CEOs sleep a little better at night. CompuData can help your business implement a BCDR plan that will protect business continuity in the face of disaster. Don’t wish you would have – actually implement a BCDR plan to keep your business productie – and revenue generating – despite any disruptive force.

Get your BCDR plan started today! Contact CompuData!