Datto Unified Business Continuity Solution for SMBs

What is Business Continuity?

It is the capability of a business to uphold a certainly level of functionality during and after a disaster has materialized. When we refer to a “certain level” of functionality, we are referring to your basic and most critical IT systems.

Why is Business Continuity important?

Organizations of all sizes face a growing list of potential threats. Those threats include weather-related disasters, cyber-related hazards, employee theft and sabotage.  These trends leave organizations vulnerable to a myriad of new and existing risks. Managing the potential of these risks by establishing a business continuity strategy is critical to the survival of any business in today’s world.

How is Business Continuity accomplished?

Essentially, business continuity involves a strategy and the implementation of that strategy by setting up IT infrastructure in a way that ensures your data and systems can be recovered quickly in the event of a catastrophic disaster. The strategy is developed in consultation with your team and implemented by an IT Consultant with a background in business continuity. Redundancies are put in place, however, backing up your data on it’s own does not form a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. One also need the ability to recover quickly with little to no additional cost. Datto BCDR incorporates both backup and recovery elements into one solution.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery is the “DR” within a BCDR plan, which aims to maintain business data and systems in the event a cyber attack, human error, inside job or other data loss situations. DR gives businesses and organizations the ability to recovery data in little to no time and resume crucial business functions. So that business can continue with little to no interruption.

Why is a Disaster Recovery Plan critically important?

Irrespective of the industry within which your organization exists, when an unexpected disastrous event occurs and stops your business from functioning, a business needs to recover as fast as possible so that it may resume providing services to it’s customers. The more downtime your have, the more money it costs your business in lost productivity, lost revenue and increased IT Support costs. The importance a Disaster Recovery cannot be overstated.

How is Disaster Recovery carried-out?

Disaster Recovery is administered from within a data recovery system. This is where the process of transferring some or all of your backed up day, in part or in whole, to a new or existing device or application, is intiated and managed. Not all DR systems can restore data in the same way or in the same amount of time. Make sure you have the abaility to restore all data or pick and choose the data you want to recover, as at a certain date in time. Without these methods, you will be disappointed in your DR solution/plan.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) is about setting up information technology so that if a disaster occurs, one can easily recovery the data. They are planning and configuration processes which help organizations prepare for disruptive events such as a power outage, flood/fire, cyber attack or other data loss event. The planning which goes into a business continuity and disaster recovery plan might be extensive depending on the organization, the nature of the business and it’s location.

The Datto products mentioned above provide a solution to backup your data and recover it efficiently in one package. Datto BCDR Solutions provide the infrastructure to accomplish BCDR in an efficient and affordable manner.

One of the most critically important IT Services 1CS provides to SMBs is a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. Your organization selects which devices or applications are critical and then we protect them using Datto BCDR Solution. The solution includes offsite backup, testing and restore support.

Take it to the next level by developing your own policies, processes and procedures so that your team knows what to do in the event of a disaster. These three P’s are crucial to any BCDR plan and mitigate against downtime and increased IT Support costs.

There are different terms used surrounding IT Business Continuity. For example the terms: business recovery, business continuance plans, bcp plan, continuity system and business recovery plan. From our standpoint, these terms are largely inter-changeable. They all infer the same idea.

From the perspective of an IT Service Provider: sometimes the lines between IT security and business continuity are blurred because they achieve a similar result, they give you control. BCP events can also be security events. Cyber attacks are a significant disaster which go a long way toward justifying the need for a proper BCDR solutions. Business continuity roles such as a business continuity coordinator may very well be experienced in cyber security services.

At 1CS, site level BCP is headed by Blake Fick. Our team of BCP & DRP consultants can conduct a business continuity risk assessment, develop business continuity management guidelines in consultation with you, explain business continuity plan conventions, carry out BCP testin and help you navigate your way through the process of selecting an appropriate BCDR solution for your business.