What is a BCDR Plan?
A Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan is crucial for any business. It outlines the processes and procedures to ensure the continuity of your critical systems in the event of a natural disaster or other incident that affects availability. From our discussions with SaaS companies, we’ve observed that many of them often overlook the need for the Disaster Recovery (DR) part of the BCDR plan. They assume that since their application is hosted on the Cloud, it’s the responsibility of the Cloud hosting provider. However, natural disasters can still impact datacenters, which can affect customer access to the application. It’s essential to have processes and procedures in place to recover in case of a disaster, and a BCDR plan can be beneficial in these situations.
Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery
While Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are two distinct concepts, they can be combined into a single plan to facilitate a BCDR plan. This approach helps businesses meet regulatory compliance frameworks (e.g. SOC 2, ISO 27001, CyberSecure Canada) or qualify for cyber insurance but also streamlines the planning process and ensures a more cohesive response to disruptions. Business Continuity, a cornerstone of your organization’s resilience, encompasses the processes that ensure the maintenance of essential functions or business processes during a disruption. Its primary objective is to keep critical operations and systems running smoothly, minimizing downtime and reducing the impact on your business. Disaster Recovery, a crucial component of preparedness, entails procedures for restoring systems, data, and infrastructure after a disaster occurs. It involves documenting step-by-step instructions and testing them in a tabletop exercise to ensure their efficacy in restoring your business operations (or SaaS application) back to normal, including data restoration and establishing communication channels. Together, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery form a comprehensive BCDR plan. Their unified goal is to shield your business from various disruptions, be it a natural calamity, a cyber attack, or any other unforeseen event.
Key Components of a BCDR Plan
While there are many subcomponents in a BCDR plan, the four major ones can be broken down into the following:
1. Establishing Recovery Objectives
The first major component is to identify all the critical systems in your organization, a process that is adaptable and dependent on your unique organizational structure. For a SaaS company, a critical system could be the Cloud hosting provider (e.g. AWS) that hosts their platform. Conversely, for a service-based company, a critical system might be their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, such as Salesforce or HubSpot. Once these systems are identified, you can establish Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for each. We delve deeper into RTO vs RPO in the FAQ section, but in essence, it refers to the maximum allowable downtime and data loss for a system. This means that different systems will have different RPOs/RTOs based on their criticality, giving you the power to tailor your approach.
2. Developing Business Continuity Strategies
Start by identifying the critical business functions that must continue without interruption. For instance, a financial services company might prioritize transaction processing and client account access, while a manufacturing company might focus on maintaining production line operations. Once these functions are identified, the next step is to create specific continuity plans for each function. These plans should detail the resources, personnel, and processes needed to keep the functions operational during a disruption. Ideally, these continuity strategies should be configured to act as automatic failovers if a business function is interrupted.
3. Developing Disaster Recovery Strategies
Start by identifying the most critical systems that need to be recovered first, such as databases, servers, or essential software applications. For each system, establish detailed recovery procedures, including data backup methods, system restoration processes, and timelines. Implementing regular data backups and ensuring they are stored securely, whether on cloud platforms or offsite locations, is crucial to minimize data loss. Additionally, disaster recovery strategies should include clear steps for coordinating with third-party vendors and service providers to ensure swift restoration of services. We recommend the 3-2-1 backup strategy when planning Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies.
4. BCDR Plan Testing and Maintenance
Finally, a BCDR plan means nothing unless it’s tested shortly after its initial creation and annually after that (or following any significant changes, e.g., adding more critical systems). This exercise is known as a live restore exercise (or tabletop) and is crucial to identifying weaknesses or gaps in your plan, allowing you to address them before a natural disaster strikes. This can be achieved by simulating a cyber attack or natural disaster to evaluate how well your team can recover and if the steps are accurate. In most cases, especially in smaller organizations, one person usually knows what to do – which doesn’t work in case that key person leaves or is unavailable. It is essential to ensure that multiple people are trained on the plan. You can view our blog post explaining table tops and access an expert-crafted template here.
Creating a BCDR Template using WatchDog Security’s Free BCDR Policy Template
Using a free subscription to the WatchDog Security platform, you can leverage our policy manager to create and disseminate policies (such as an BCDR Policy and more) to your team members and have a centralized hub to manage everything. To get started sign up here. Once you sign up, navigate to Policy Manager and click Create New Policy. Select the Create Using Template option to pre-populate it with various information to help speed up policy development. Edit the highlighted parts of the policy with your organization-accepted parameters and click Publish Policy. Now all the users added via Employee Management will receive the policy to accept in their dashboard.
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1. What is the difference between RTO and RPO?
The RTO, or Recovery Time Objective, is a crucial concept that defines the maximum acceptable duration that a critical system can be down before it causes significant harm to the business. For example, suppose the RTO for your email server is set at four hours. In that case, this means that in the event of a disruption, the system must be fully restored and operational within four hours to avoid major business impacts. Similarly, the RPO, or Recovery Point Objective, is another vital concept that determines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. If your RPO for a database is set at one hour, your backups or data replication should ensure that no more than one hour’s worth of data is lost in case of a system failure.
2. What is the 3-2-1 backup strategy and is it still relevant in 2024?
While the 3-2-1 backup strategy was initially proposed in the early 2000s, it has undergone natural evolutions and improvements to keep current. It remains the gold standard for creating Backups that can stand the test of time (and, more importantly, hackers who encrypt your data via ransomware attacks). The 3-2-1 backup strategy includes keeping three copies of your data: the original and two backups. The backups should be stored on two different types of media, such as an external hard drive and a cloud storage service, to mitigate the risk of data loss from a single point of failure. Finally, one of these backups should be kept offsite, away from your primary location, to ensure that your data remains secure even during a disaster, such as a fire or flood, or a cyber incident, such as a ransomware attack.
3. How often should I update my BCDR Plan?
There is no definitive answer, as BCDR plan updates depend on the organization and its needs. However, as a general rule of thumb, you should do a live restore exercise annually (if there have been no changes) and identify weaknesses that would require updates to the BCDR plan. When a new system is introduced (e.g., a new VPS provider for a virtual server), the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery procedures should be documented, and a live restore test should be held shortly after. To summarize, it depends, but at the very minimum, annually.
Common failures in disaster recovery efforts include inadequate testing, insufficient backups, and a lack of offsite backups, which ransomware operators often exploit. In addition, poor communication and unclear roles during a disaster also contribute to delays and confusion. To mitigate these issues and protect against ransomware attacks, it is essential to regularly update the disaster recovery plan, conduct frequent live restore tests and table top excerises, and ensure that offsite backups are in place.
