Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR)

Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR) definition

“Business Continuity Disaster Recovery”, or “BCDR” for short, is used throughout the IT industry as a benchmark for organization resiliency in the face of unplanned disruptions. ‘Business Continuity’ refers to an organization’s level of readiness to continue mission-critical operations throughout and after an emergency or disruption.

‘Disaster Recovery’ refers to an organization’s process of regaining access and functionality to infrastructure or critical systems the event of a disruption. Potential disruptions impacting today’s businesses include, but are not limited to, security breaches, power outages, natural disasters, human error, and more.

Ideal Business Continuity Disaster Recovery strategies are designed to minimize downtown and data loss. ‘Business continuity’ delivers a proactive focus on conducting organizational procedures, while disaster recovery offers reactive controls to get systems, infrastructure, and data back online.

An organization’s IT department will have BCDR strategies and plans in place for responses to both general and specific types of disruptions. C-suite executives will usually be involved in the development of an organization’s overarching BCDR plans as part of a holistic strategy to mitigate and minimize business risk. IT departments will adapt and update their BCDR strategies based on changes to their infrastructure and changes to the capabilities and severity of the possible disruptions they could experience.

How does BCDR work?

The goal of an organization’s Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategy and plan is to achieve business resiliency. Today organizations are facing a myriad of unique and complex challenges and threats. Therefore, an organization’s BCDR plan should account for a variety of disaster scenarios, ranging from accidental deletions to ransomware and cyberattacks to fallout from natural disasters. Developing an effective Business Continuity Disaster Recovery plan typically requires thorough, cross-functional planning and preparations.

An effective BCDR plan is comprised of a set of steps that should be taken to ensure that the organization’s operations aren’t interrupted and that it's IT systems and applications are fully functional. While the specific steps and overarching strategy of an organization’s BCDR plan can vary based on industry and IT infrastructure, there are some fundamental components of every successful BCDR plan. These include, but are not limited to:

• Identifying and prioritizing mission critical assets
• Protecting the organization’s data storage, servers, and networks
• Conducting risk management assessments
• Setting overarching policies and strategies to combat risks
• Executing consistent data backup operations and replication to secure storage
• Developing and institutionalizing a full IT recovery process
• Validating and testing all procedures and processes of the plan
• Incorporating any new technology into the plan

Why is BCDR important?

Implementing and operating a comprehensive and effective Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan is tremendously important for an organization’s health and profitability. Without a stress-tested BCDR plan, an organization could suffer a catastrophic disruption to its business functionality in the event of a disaster. If an organization’s operations grind to a halt, then its customers potentially won’t be able to receive the organization’s products or services in a timely manner. Thus, resulting in customer dissatisfaction or even potential physical harm. Long-lasting business disruptions can result in forfeited market share and loss of investor confidence. If a data breach occurs, an organization could suffer immense harm to its public reputation and be subjected to hefty regulatory fines.

Benefits of BCDR

A BCDR plan should enable an organization to respond to a disruption quickly. Developing BCDR strategies that will minimize the effects of cyberattacks and outages will, in turn, help to improve overall operational effectiveness and decrease the risks from both internal and external threats. By formulating and continuously revising its BCDR plan, an organization can improve its security posture, reduce the risk of data loss, prevent reputation damage, and safeguard customer and employee trust.

Data protection and its role in BCDR

While having a Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan should be ubiquitous throughout all organizations, regardless of size and industry, Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) plays a vital role in an organization ability to deliver upon BCDR goals. Here’s how:

• Protecting data sprawl in hybrid environments – Organizations operating with hybrid cloud environments will typically generate a lot of data and have a broad surface area to protect. This could potential open themselves up to a spectrum of failure points and attack vectors. Therefore, whether migrating workloads to the cloud, or repatriating applications back on-premise, managing hybrid cloud environments be complex and ever-changing.  Solid DPaaS offerings enable businesses to protect data where it lives today (and tomorrow) without regularly adjusting their BCDR plans to manage new risks or environments across their growing data estate.
  
• Safeguarding mission-critical workloads – No two applications are created equal. The importance of particular workloads and technology processes may ebb and flow depending on current infrastructure, their role they play within the business, or what data the house. With robust Data Protection as a Service organizations can prioritize safeguarding these applications first, offering a risk-aligned, effective, and practical strategy that hardens most critical assets first.
  
• Fulfilling the SaaS shared responsibility – In the shared responsibility model for SaaS applications, the organization using the application is responsible for data protection and backups, not the application provider. With DPaaS, when an organization procures and implements a new SaaS application, they can rapidly incorporate these apps under existing BCDR plans without a lift.
  
• Layered ransomware response – Cyberthreats are evolving and becoming more sophisticated. But what hasn’t changed, their motives: getting to and exploiting business data. By incorporating DPaaS as a primary element of Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategies, you can standardize compliance SLAs and achieve rapid recoverability from these threats. Best-in-class DPaaS also offer robust threat insights to monitor suspicious activity and proactively flag risks and kickstart recovery to minimize business impact.

Does Commvault offer BCDR?

Yes, our Data Protection as a Service platform can be an bedrock component of an organization’s BCDR plan. Commvault DPaaS offers flexibility, breadth of coverage, ultimate security, and bottom-line savings to ensure that an organization’s data is protected (and recoverable) today and in the future. We offer powerful, enterprise-grade, cloud-based data protection with air-gapped protection against cyberattacks with Air Gap Protect, and provides early warning ransomware detection with its cyber deception solution, Threatwise. Commvault DPaaS portfolio safeguards an organization’s data and enables effective BCDR plans.