Top Business Continuity Solutions to Minimize IT Downtime
Business continuity and disaster recovery are essential components of any business strategy to ensure normal operations. Downtime can happen at any time and is usually unexpected (except planned downtime for maintenance). It interrupts the normal processes of computer systems and negatively impacts the entire business cycle. As a result, customers’ trust can be affected, leading to financial losses.
Organizations cannot guarantee that they will not encounter data loss and downtime. To reduce these risks, they need dedicated business continuity solutions to ensure data protection and effective disaster recovery.
Understanding Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery
Business continuity and disaster recovery may seem similar, but these two approaches have differences despite their dependencies.
Business continuity is a set of procedures to reduce the risk of data loss, hardware failures, virus infections, natural disasters and other accidents that cause service disruptions and downtime. Additionally, business continuity presumes recovering mission-critical operations as fast as possible. This broad set of measures and plans covers more than just an organization’s IT operations.
Disaster recovery is a set of measures to restore data and resume the normal operations of IT systems. The disaster recovery plan is a main component of effective business continuity and it is activated when an incident occurs. Backup, recovery, replication and failover are the main elements of disaster recovery.
Business continuity presumes the proactive aspect and preventive measures, while disaster recovery requires reactive actions. Business continuity and disaster recovery complement each other and should be used together.
VM disaster recovery and physical server disaster recovery are different. The preferred method for virtual machines is using an agentless host-based approach to back up and recover VMs. That’s why it is recommended to choose a VM disaster recovery solution supporting VM backup, recovery and replication on the host level using APIs provided by the virtualization vendor. To back up physical machines, the software agent of the backup application should be installed on the machine.
Key Features of Business Continuity Management Software
To ensure business continuity and perform disaster recovery, it is recommended that you use dedicated solutions. This software helps organizations prepare for disasters and system failures and recover data and operations after disruptive events. An effective business continuity management software provides the key features below.
Automated risk assessment and incident response
This functionality is used to identify potential risks and vulnerabilities in your systems, processes and infrastructure. Automating response actions when a disruptive incident occurs allows organizations to reduce downtime and minimize human error. Automation also reduces the response time.
Data backup and disaster recovery services
Data protection is one of the main features because it ensures that data is safely backed up and can be quickly restored in case of data loss or system failure. Automated and scheduled backups allow you to constantly protect your data. It is recommended to use disaster recovery software that can protect multiple platforms and supports different storage destinations. Backup testing is also important because it ensures that backups are consistent and can be recovered if a disruptive incident occurs.
Real-time monitoring and reporting
Monitoring is necessary to detect abnormal and suspicious behavior in time and react quickly. Reporting actions based on triggers ensures that you don’t miss events that can impact business continuity. Real-time alerts and notifications should be displayed in dashboards and sent via email or other messaging services. Collected data is used for analysis and continuous improvement for business continuity and disaster recovery.
Top Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Solutions
Below is a list of top solutions developed to ensure business continuity and perform disaster recovery.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a data protection and business continuity solution that provides comprehensive backup, replication, failover and disaster recovery, supporting virtual, physical, cloud and SaaS environments. Backup and disaster recovery testing are supported with a high level of automation. You can store backups locally, in the cloud, on tape or deduplication appliances. NAKIVO Proxmox backup solution is also available to protect Proxmox VE VMs.
Ransomware resilience can be ensured with backup immutability and integrations with third-party antivirus software to perform pre-recovery malware scans. VMware vSphere infrastructure monitoring, automatic alerts and notifications allow administrators to react in time in case an abnormal behavior is detected.
Instant recovery features allow you to boot virtual machines immediately from a backup until you can perform a full recovery or recover specific files. Real-time replication in the NAKIVO VMware backup solution enables you to restore VMware vSphere VMs as fast as possible and achieve tight RTOs and RPOs. The Site Recovery feature can create complex disaster recovery workflows and run them automatically in case of an incident.
You can download the 15-day Free Trial to experience the fully featured solution.
Archer Business Resiliency
Archer Business Resiliency is a solution by Archer, a risk management provider. This solution is used for risk and impact analysis in business continuity planning. One of the main features is the ability to catalog critical processes and applications to estimate resilience risks.
A centralized command center for incident response allows administrators to react quickly and minimize the negative impact on an organization in case of an incident. Administrators can view detailed reports about disaster recovery and business continuity plans. This information can be used to estimate the integrated risk summary.
Fusion Framework System
Fusion Framework System is a cloud-based solution for business continuity management that allows organizations to estimate the resilience of their business continuity and related processes. A graphical user interface with visualization makes it more convenient to understand the status of the entire infrastructure. This solution is the flagship of the Fusion Risk Management provider and is highly customizable.
Integrated risk management and compliance help businesses analyze risks and prepare to recover data and workflows after a cyberattack or similar incidents. Using this solution, organizations can adapt to situations that are dynamically changing. This flexible approach is more effective than a static plan.
Riskonnect Business Continuity & Resilience
Riskonnect Business Continuity & Resilience (formerly known as Castellan) is a software and one of the business continuity solutions that assesses risks and manages compliance across the digital infrastructure of an organization. Real-time risk monitoring and reporting allow organizations to prepare for disasters across their IT infrastructure and reduce disruptions.
Incident management and response automation, including pre-built workflows and response plan tracking, are attractive features for large enterprises requiring up-to-date and efficient disaster recovery plans. Visualizing a map of the entire infrastructure is great for identifying risks across the entire organization.
SAI360 Business Continuity Management
SAI360 belongs to integrated business continuity solutions that streamlines risk management workflows, ensures compliance and improves security. Its unique feature is combining software and training content for AI-driven risk insights and business continuity planning using proprietary algorithms. Advanced analysis helps detect dependency gaps and critical vulnerabilities.
Robust business continuity capabilities are attractive for medium-sized organizations and enterprises. This cloud-based solution provides a powerful API for developers. The compliance-driven approach to disaster recovery is convenient because it can integrate with multiple compliance standards, such as GDPR, ISO, NIST, HiTRUST, SOC2, etc. The solution can track regulatory changes to prevent compliance violations and fines.
Cost of IT Downtime and ROI of Business Continuity Solutions
Normal operations are disrupted or completely stopped during downtime, leading to data loss, customer dissatisfaction, revenue loss and reputational damages.
Estimated downtime costs can be calculated using the formula below:
Downtime Costs = (Revenue per Hour + Employee Cost per Hour + Recovery Cost) x Duration
ITIC (Information Technology Intelligence Consulting) reported the average cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute or $300,000 per hour for middle-sized and large enterprises. The cost of IT downtime can be devastating and it is better to invest in business continuity and disaster recovery solutions.
The return on investment (ROI) of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions (BCDR) can be calculated using the formula:
ROI from BCDR = (Downtime Costs Avoided – Cost of BCDR Investment) / Cost of Investment
Investing in BCDR solutions provides multiple benefits, including:
- Reduced recovery time and RTO.
- Reduced Recovery Point Objective (RPO) because a well-configured solution allows you to schedule frequent backups.
- Business continuity is improved.
- Ransomware protection is used to prevent expensive data recovery and paying a ransom.
- Improves overall cost efficiency, customer trust and business partnerships.
It is more cost-effective to pay for implementing a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy using dedicated solutions.
Conclusion
The right business continuity and data protection solution can help you prevent downtime by providing features like monitoring, flexible settings for backup, replication, instant recovery and backup testing. When implementing a business continuity plan, you should assess risks, compose a plan, define responsibilities, train employees, define their roles and update the plan regularly.
