Key points
- BCDR Defined: Business continuity and disaster recovery keeps critical business functions running during disruption and restores IT systems and data afterward.
- Account for Modern Downtime Risks: BCDR planning must address ransomware, cloud and SaaS outages, identity-based attacks, and vendor failures.
- Prioritize Critical Systems with RTOs and RPOs: Effective BCDR plans define recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives based on business impact.
- Test and Update BCDR Plans: BCDR plans should be tested frequently through backup verification, failover and failback testing, and emergency drills.
- Essential for Compliance: For MSPs and IT teams, BCDR is foundational to cyber resilience, regulatory compliance, and maintaining customer trust.
Perhaps the worst IT scenario an organization can face is an unexpected and forced suspension of all its operations. The cost of downtime in such a situation far exceeds the damage from lost data or hits to reputation. While cyberattacks vary in intensity and approach, downtime and catastrophic data loss come in many more forms and are equally (if not more) difficult to avoid.
That’s because there’s simply no way to guarantee that an organization will never face a disaster. Ransomware isn’t the only cause for worry; hardware failures, human error, natural disasters, and numerous other factors can all bring an organization to a halt.
There are measures that managed service providers (MSPs) and IT professionals can take to mitigate this sort of damage and quickly restart operations, of course. A business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan is the ideal starting point. In this post, we’ll discuss BCDR, why it’s important, and how to plan for the unexpected.
What is business continuity?
Business continuity attempts to define exactly how a business will respond during a disaster in hopes of avoiding downtime and keeping operations running. It includes
- contingency/relocation plans,
- staff replacement protocols, and
- failover plans.
Business continuity planning will often take into account smaller interruptions or minor disasters, such as extended power outages or transportation shutdowns. That said, business continuity strategies should be comprehensive, considering all available resources while specifying individual and organizational responsibilities.
Overall, a business continuity plan details the key services, such as IT infrastructure and communication channels, that are essential to continued operations, as well as the steps to keep them running under challenging conditions.
What is disaster recovery?
Disaster recovery refers to the plans a business puts into place for responding to a catastrophic event, whether it’s a natural disaster, a fire, an act of terror, or a cybercrime. Nowadays, a modern downtime can be caused by
- cloud service outages (e.g., AWS, Azure, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace),
- identity-based attacks (via token theft, MFA fatigue, or session hijacking),
- configuration drift and automation failures, and even
- vendor and MSP tool outages.
With this in mind, disaster recovery plans define how an organization will respond to such an event and return to safe, normal operation as quickly as possible. More importantly, these plans should also account for cloud-first environments and SaaS dependencies, not just physical infrastructure loss.
As with business continuity, the primary goal of disaster recovery is to minimize downtime and restart all systems and applications while minimizing data loss and overall impact to the organization’s operations.
What are the differences between business continuity and disaster recovery?
Though they look almost the same on the surface, comparing business continuity vs. disaster recovery reveals a few key distinctions, all of which nonetheless highlight that MSPs need to create plans of both kinds to be sufficiently prepared for disaster.
Simply put, business continuity broadly ensures critical business functions continue at an acceptable level, while disaster recovery focuses on restoring IT systems and data after disruption.
These outcomes can also be looked at in terms of degrees or even consequences. Business continuity is the “get it running so we can keep the doors open” step that kicks in when a disaster strikes. Disaster recovery comes into play shortly thereafter with a different goal of restoring operations to normal.
Disaster recovery plans are considerably more focused on the “disaster” part of BCDR, and these strategies can involve employee safety measures (e.g. fire drills, PPE, or purchasing emergency supplies). Business continuity plans, on the other hands, usually involve a strong focus on minimizing operational downtime from a logistical or technological standpoint.
That said, only by combining the two concepts into a comprehensive BCDR strategy can businesses truly prepare for disastrous events.
The importance of business continuity and disaster recovery
When disaster strikes and a business doesn’t have the proper plans in place, the effects can be catastrophic. Any stoppage of operations will almost certainly lead to financial loss; the longer the business goes without delivering its products and services, the more it suffers. It often doesn’t take long before these losses force a business to make tough decisions, such as cutting employees or closing up entirely.
Disasters also bring technological consequences, including
- the loss of important or sensitive data,
- hardware failures, or even
- the destruction of critical technology in a fire or flood.
While we can’t stop these from happening, BCDR plans can help companies minimize their consequences. They take the guesswork out of emergency response, and stakeholders may feel more comfortable at work when there are clear policies for how to respond to disasters.
In large organizations, crisis management professionals are often employed or contracted to develop and implement these plans. They’ll usually be involved in evaluating and revising them as needed, even training employees on how to follow the defined policies.
Most businesses don’t have full-time crisis management staff or a budget for third-party BCDR consultants. This is why MSPs typically step in as the subject matter experts in cybersecurity, data loss prevention, backup and recovery, and other IT-focused business continuity solutions.
Effective BCDR planning
Every BCDR plan should be tailored to the organization’s unique operational requirements, risks, and options for facing disasters. While it would be ideal to plan for every possible disaster, it’s fairly impossible to be that well prepared. As such, BCDR plans will usually focus on the most likely scenarios based on the business, region, and known risks.
The following steps will help you and your clients create a BCDR plan that focuses on minimizing a disaster’s impact on their operations:
1. Evaluate for weaknesses and obvious risks
Begin with a thorough assessment of each department within the company and list the security gaps that can lead to unwanted downtime. Address these vulnerabilities as needed, or implement plans to resolve them over time.
Some common risk factors include the following:
- Outdated hardware
- A large remote workforce and possible unmanaged devices
- Older versions of operating systems and software
- Unsafe network connections
- The absence of recommended data protection solutions
- A lack of security awareness training among the workforce
2. Assign response team
No plan is complete without a team to carry it out. Choose suitable disaster management representatives and ensure that each is fully aware of their role and responsibilities.
Furthermore, establish clear communication channels among those involved and keep everyone informed on the latest developments and updates, especially during BCDR planning and disaster events.
The BCDR plan will usually require input from high-level individuals such as
- senior management executives,
- IT professionals,
- information security officers,
- heads of departments, and
- business partners.
3. Identify critical data and workloads
From an IT perspective, it’s critical to classify data based on importance. Determine which workflows and files are crucial for staying operational and supporting ongoing productivity.
In many industries, you’ll need to prioritize data subject to regulations, which include. DORA, NIS2, HIPAA, and so on. Also consider
- financial logs and billing systems,
- vendor/customer data, and
- any software needed to conduct business.
All of this information will be important when deploying your data backup and disaster recovery (BDR) tools.
4. Define RTOs and RPOs
Once you know which data and hardware are critical for the organization’s continuity, you can decide on recovery targets for each type of machine and data.
Determining recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) is a crucial step that’s often overlooked. These represent how much downtime and loss of data the organization can reasonably tolerate before services are fully restored, and they’re immensely important when choosing and implementing data backup services.
Addressing these parameters can involve establishing tiered workloads and application dependency mapping (ADM), not to mention running business impact analyses (BIA) and continuous data protection for more critical systems.
5. Test and review your plan regularly
Lastly, you don’t want to wait until the worst happens to discover that your BCDR plan is insufficient or outdated. Conducting full-scale testing at regular intervals will ensure that the organization is truly prepared and not complacent during disasters.
Modern data protection solutions allow you to verify if backups are usable. You can also run site recovery jobs, test failover, and failback to verify whether systems can be restored and all changes are preserved.
Emergency drills are also recommended to ensure that everyone in the organization is prepared and can complete their responsibilities as quickly as possible. Based on the results of these test runs, leadership should be able to assess the plan and update it as needed.
To see these principles demonstrated in context, you can view this short video: What Is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)?.
Partnering with NinjaOne
Now more than ever, it’s essential for organizations to prepare for any disaster that can affect their data and halt business operations. Having a comprehensive BCDR plan can help you and your clients mitigate the risks, minimize downtime, and ensure that critical data is recovered quickly after a disruption or cyberattack.
NinjaOne is here to help IT teams and MSPs manage their business efficiently and securely, with users relying on its cutting-edge RMM platform to navigate the complexities of modern IT management.
Alongside this solution, NinjaOne Backup for endpoints and SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace helps ensure that critical data remains protected across environments. With centralized visibility, proactive alerting, and streamlined management from a single pane of glass, MSPs can respond faster, recover more confidently, and keep business operations moving forward, even when the unexpected occurs.
If you’re ready to become a NinjaOne partner, schedule a demo or start your 14-day trial to see why over tens of thousands of customers have already chosen NinjaOne as their partner in secure remote management and data backup.
