The Role of Disaster Recovery in a Business Continuity Plan

No one disputes that a business continuity plan is essential. Decades ago, these plans were primarily focused on how to keep a business physically operating during disaster events such as floods or fires, but the growing reliance on digital data — and the emergence of new threats like ransomware — have completely changed what is included in a modern business continuity plan.

Today’s plans must be data-centric and provide ways for essential applications and workloads to remain operational while data recovery and restoration take place.

Despite the many risks facing today’s businesses, a surprising number of organizations still lack concrete business continuity plans. According to a 2020 survey conducted by Mercer, 27.2% of companies do not have a business continuity plan in place. This figure is even more startling when you consider that roughly 90% of businesses without a disaster recovery plan in place will fail within one year of a major disaster event.

The Role of Disaster Recovery in a Business Continuity Plan

A good business continuity plan has many facets, from assessing the risks and potential impact of a disaster event to assigning individuals specific roles and responsibilities. And while a business continuity plan involves many departments and personnel, disaster recovery is one of the most crucial — if not arguably the most important — elements of such a plan.

Disaster recovery centers on recovering and restoring mission-critical data and applications during a disaster event. When successful, this minimizes downtime that would otherwise disable internal processes and disrupt end users, and enables a business to continue its operations while a full recovery completes — however long that may be.

Put simply, a business continuity plan prioritizes certain operational needs over others. Having a way to get mission-critical data restored and core applications back up and running is often the first step in maintaining business continuity.

This is precisely why having a disaster recovery plan in place is essential. Without one, a disaster event can quickly cause a chain reaction that leaves the business vulnerable to permanent data loss and persistent disruptions to customers, resulting in revenue loss, damage to reputation, and potential legal liabilities.

Ensure Business Continuity with the Industry’s Best Cloud Backup as a Service

Cloud backup as a service is a critical element of disaster recovery for any organization looking to ensure business continuity during an outage or cyber attack. The backup of data and applications provides businesses with a way to restore from a point in time and continue core operations while a full recovery completes.

A business continuity plan is only as good as the tools it utilizes. Clumio’s backup-as-a-service platform equips enterprises with a wide range of backup and data protection features that safeguard mission-critical data and enable fast restores in the face of corrupted data or complete data loss.

Clumio’s innovative features include:

• Instant backups of AWS data across the organization
• Air-gapped backups stored outside of the primary account and region to ensure secure protection from ransomware and other cyber attacks
• Granular, flexible file recovery that targets specific files and workloads and lowers RTO

Find out why Clumio is the industry’s leading developer for AWS cloud backup. Schedule a demo today and learn how your business can get started with Clumio in under 15 minutes, without the need to install new infrastructure or software, or conduct any pre-planning beforehand.

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