If you woke up one day to find that your business had experienced the worst – a compromised IT system – how would you move forward? Whether it’s a cyberattack, physical disaster, or a system failure, business continuity planning is the key to minimising damage.
Although it may seem extreme, this scenario is frighteningly common, with repeated attacks and IT shutdowns reported. In fact, this year just over one fifth (21%) of UK businesses suffered a data breach once a month. This has made business cybersecurity an increasingly pressing matter, but not our only strategy for protecting data.
Maintaining your core operations, ie business continuity, is the best strategy for strong disaster recovery. It is not merely a precaution to consider, but a necessary and actionable set of plans to help you recover from organisation-wide IT incidents. Having continuity plans ensures your business can continue delivering key services and functions no matter what.
So, here we dig deeper into business continuity planning, and explore a key component of it – your backup system. As award-winning experts in the London IT support sector, we provide trusted advice on planning for disaster and recovery, and share tips on potential data backup options.
What is business continuity planning?
Business continuity planning is a proactive way of analysing potential disruptions to your company’s operations. The aim of continuity planning is to prevent a complete shutdown and keep your crucial operations afloat. This process involves creating strategies and measures to be enforced in the event of an incident.
For your business IT system, these problems typically fall into two categories:
Physical threats
Physical threats are those that physically disrupt, damage or destroy IT infrastructure, such as fires, flooding, or theft. This category also includes the failure of key equipment, for example due to power surges or hardware crashes.
Software threats
Software threats, also known as cyber threats, infect your system with malicious code, such as through viruses or trojans. Hackers may also gain unauthorised access to your digital spaces to steal or corrupt sensitive data, often leaving parts of your system unusable.
A strong and effective business continuity plan will not simply detect these threats. You must be able to identify your essential functions and establish clear policies for all employees to follow. By preparing for these threats and treating them separately, your business can emerge more resilient after recovery. Remember that how you react to an incident will also impact your reputation with customers and stakeholders.
Disaster planning
Your business continuity plan must go beyond understanding the threats and instead detail the steps to restore systems and recover data. It’s important that these measures ensure fast business recovery for key systems. This part of continuity planning is known specifically as disaster recovery.
Good continuity planning involves methodically examining the threats to your business:
1. Assess the threats
Consider what possible scenarios could occur and how these threats could impact your IT systems. As we mentioned, these threats are typically separated into physical and digital categories.
For instance, a fire on your premises would most likely result in data loss on physical servers and significant downtime. In contrast, internet issues would directly affect any cloud services and communication with remote workers.
Closely assess your business’ dependency on different resources and decide which parts of your IT infrastructure are most critical for daily operations. Speak to all your departments and see where their tech priorities lie.
2. Determine the likelihood of each threat
Once you have laid out the potential threats, you must evaluate the likelihood of each threat materialising. Some may cause immediate damage to your system, therefore it is vital that you consider what incidents are most probable.
To investigate threat probability, you’ll require expert help. Your IT supplier can assist you in carrying out risk assessments, understanding attack trends, and researching potential impacts. However, for in depth analysis you may also want the aid of IT specialists and cybersecurity experts.
3. Work out the potential damage
Finally, you must consider the outcome for different areas of your business. Here are some areas which could be impacted by an IT incident:
Operations: Would the threat take your main customer database offline? Or would the impact be relatively minor? A virus infection could only impact the downtime of a few computers, whereas a data breach could cause huge unsalvageable data losses.
Finances: How much revenue would you lose if your systems were down? How much would you have to spend on new hardware or to restore data? The financial implications of a breach may be easily quantifiable when it comes to equipment.
Reputational: What do the long-term effects look like for your business’ image? Longer downtime will mean lessened services for your customers, which over time can erode trust, damaging your brand’s image.
Your continuity planning should prioritise threats with the highest likelihood of happening and the potential to cause most damage to critical systems.
Identify and eliminate single points of failure. For instance, a power cut could take your server offline. Or, if your customer database is held in the cloud, losing your internet connection could mean you’re unable to check customer details.
In both cases, you might consider adding backup systems. An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) can keep your server running, ensuring you don’t lose key data backups and access to files. In addition, you may want to consider using a cheap broadband service to provide a secondary internet connection.
Continuity planning: your business recovery plan
As well as taking steps to reduce the likelihood of identified threats, continuity planning covers your recovery measures. Your business recovery plan should then describe how your organisation will react in the event of a problem. Here is some key advice when putting together recovery plans:
- Establish procedures to follow if something goes wrong. Have clear lines of communication across your organisation to notify key people quickly. In larger organisations this may involve delegating procedures to heads of departments.
- Plan how to get up and running. For example, could you share offices with another company if your premises were out of action? Or perhaps you need to have extra cloud storage space available if your server or NAS is down?
- Think about short term contingencies. If it will take time to fix your systems, how will you cope in the meantime? Can you work manually, or do you have other devices available to use?
Once you’ve put a business recovery plan together, test it. Simulate a crisis scenario to evaluate how your communications work in practice, and measure how long it takes to return to normal. The goal of testing your recovery plans is to identify any weaknesses in your procedures which may hinder recovery. Regularly practising organisation-wide incident response will help improve effectiveness, speed up recovery steps and enhance employee preparedness.
You may wish to consider your business recovery plan when negotiating with IT suppliers. For example, you might want to include faster IT support response time in the event of important systems failing.
Your backup system
Your continuity planning should include a backup system, so you have a safe copy of key data. There are a few factors that will influence your choice of backup system:
How much data you need to backup
For example, if your business handles large volumes of data, you’ll need a backup solution to suit your needs. Some traditional backup options such as DVD backups can copy large amounts of data. However, if you’re looking to scale up your needs quickly, a cloud backup system might be more appropriate.
How often you need to back up
If you need to back up regularly, it’s good to have a system in place to ensure you don’t miss crucial data. That’s where automated backups provide consistent protection, meaning you don’t have to rely on manual backup.
You can also choose between incremental or full backups, where the former only saves changes since your last backup. Incremental backups can be faster and prove the better choice for saving storage space.
How long will you need to keep your backups
Whether it’s weeks, months, or years, consider how long you need to keep your data copies for. Some data retention depends on regulatory and industry policies, so take into account your business compliance. For long term data storage, you may have the option to archive data in your backup system. This takes older data away from your primary backup storage, allowing you to free up space whilst being able to access it.
Where your data is stored
Decide whether you want primarily onsite storage or remote storage solutions. Onsite offers the potential for quick data recovery, but offsite protects you from physical disasters. Often, businesses opt for hybrid backup solutions, following the 3-2-1 storage approach. This allows you to achieve strong business continuity, as data copies will always be accessible despite varying circumstances.
Facilities and equipment
Ensure you have a secure way of accessing backups if your hardware is affected. This means your files must be compatible with your secondary systems.
Having multiple backup locations enables you to restore a copy in the event of disaster. Also, ensure you test your backups regularly. Many businesses will neglect this step, only to discover their backups are useless when they have a real emergency.
It’s increasingly common for companies to use cloud backup, rather than creating backup copies of their data locally. This option delivers a continuous service via the internet in exchange for a fixed fee.
Seek expert IT support for business continuity planning
If you have any further queries about continuity planning, or would like to seek IT support for the disaster planning, recovery or data backup process, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the award-winning totality services team.