When it comes to disaster recovery and business continuity, there is a lot of noise out there. Based on more than twenty years of trusted IT infrastructure experience, KKworx custom plans work to minimize the effects of disruptive events and allow your people, your business processes, and your IT and communication systems to remain operational.
Understanding the Difference & Why Both Are Important
Every business can benefit from understanding the difference between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. Both are important to ensure the right safe-guards against downtime and data loss are in place at all times.
As the name implies, a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) focuses on keeping mission critical business functions operational in the face of disruptive events to ensure business survival. System design, implementation, support, and maintenance are all based on Business Continuity. It is the big picture. A BCP allows you to continue or re-establish business functions as smoothly as possible.
A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP), on the other hand, is a subset of Business Continuity and focuses entirely on data and IT systems that support these critical business functions. A DRP is solely concerned with IT resources and utilizes strategic tactics such as Continuous Availability to avoid downtime and Back-Up to ensure you can recover data and systems.
Backup is a separate measure to mitigate against user failure, and to replicate your data out of region, by archiving data/files from a single server. Our state-of-the-art Barracuda Networks backup solutions offer on-premise-based or cloud-based solutions, with the ability to replicate to a Barracuda state of the art data center as added protection and as a subsequent disaster recovery solution. Barracuda solutions are faster, more reliable, and better protected from corruption than old tape-based systems. This is just one of the many options you have for protecting your IT resources in support of your DRP.
Continuous Availability plans keep your IT systems always available, even after a disaster. You avoid downtime from either planned or unplanned outages — in other words, you seek a recovery time objective (RTO) of zero — but you don’t have full Business Continuity (BC) because you’re only looking at IT resources.
Business Continuity (BC) is a macro term more focused on business operations. Disaster Recovery (DR) is a subset of Business Continuity and focuses entirely on IT resource failover. Backup is a tactic—a simple way to ensure you can recover data and systems. These definitions are often mistakenly used interchangeably. Bottom Line: To effectively minimize, or avoid altogether, the loss of time, data, functionality, money, and business processes critical to your competitive advantage, you need both a BCP and a DRP. There are many options available to tailor a unique solution to your specific needs. KKworx can assist your organization with custom BRP and DRP solutions that fit your cost and business objectives.
Making the Business Case for Disaster Recovery
Determining how much it will cost to ensure the function and survival of your business when disaster strikes depends on how close to zero you need to cut your losses.
KKworx works closely with your organization’s team to determine the best approach for your Disaster Recovery solution based on the key factors described below. Through a quantitative evaluation of your needs, a custom DRP can be intelligently architected to deliver the peace of mind and business results you need during these stressful times.
How much data can you afford to lose? With inexpensive daily backups, you might lose up to 24 hours of data. With more expensive solutions, you can cut your losses to virtually zero.
How soon do you need to have your systems up and running? Again, the less expensive solutions may involve post-disaster reconfigurations, which take more time.
How much does an hour of downtime cost your company? This figure puts your RTO in perspective: if downtime is costing you only $100 an hour, you can realistically afford an RTO of multiple hours or days much more easily than if it costs you $25,000 per hour.
Let our more than 20 years of infrastructure experience deliver a plan that’s right for you.
