What is Business Continuity?

Business continuity is an umbrella term that refers to a multifaceted planning process through which a business endeavors to keep its critical IT systems operating reliably under a variety of adverse conditions. Organizations engage in business continuity planning proactively, seeking to identify events or conditions that could conceivably lead to IT system downtime or data loss. With an understanding of how events such as cyberattack, hardware failure, or natural disaster might impact critical business systems and data, organizations can take steps to limit the likelihood of downtime or data loss even in the worst of situations.

What Is the Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?

The terms business continuity and disaster recovery are often used interchangeably, but although they definitely go hand-in-hand, they have distinct differences. Business continuity planning is a comprehensive process that is primarily focused on keeping a business’ critical systems operational during a crisis event. This may include measures such as establishing redundant infrastructure, establishing backup management procedures, and creating guidelines for employee conduct during an adverse event.

In contrast, disaster recovery or disaster planning refers to a set of procedures for mitigating any losses and recovering normal business functions as quickly as possible after disruption. Disaster recovery commonly focuses on restoring data and IT system functionality immediately following a crisis event like disaster or cyberattack. This is why careful business continuity planning and backup management procedures are the foundation of a successful disaster recovery effort.

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Business Continuity & Disaster Planning Consultation

Keeping your business running with minimal downtime during a crisis event like a natural disaster or ransomware attack requires forethought and careful planning. In addition to deploying a solid data backup and recovery solution, your business needs a written plan that provides clear action steps that guide you through the crisis event and onward to recovery. With a business continuity and disaster recovery plan, you know the steps to take to keep your employees productive and to limit financial losses during an adverse event.

Benefits of NexusTek’s business continuity and disaster planning include:

Customized Plan

Based on our evaluation, NexusTek will design a customized plan that targets the areas of weakness identified in our evaluation, providing recommended steps for maintaining uptime of critical systems, preventing data loss, and quickly recovering IT functionality and restoring data following a crisis event.

Better Understand Your Risks

NexusTek’s business continuity consultant will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your company’s IT systems, helping you to understand any areas of vulnerability and how these vulnerabilities might affect your business should adverse events occur.

Implementation & Testing

To ensure quality, NexusTek will implement the plan along with an ongoing testing and validation process, making sure that your business continuity plan adapts to your company’s needs over time.

Recognize Business-Critical Systems & Data

Our consultant will work with you to identify the portions of your infrastructure and data that absolutely must be operational for your business to function properly, helping you to target your business continuity and backup management efforts more strategically.

NexusTek’s Data Backup & Recovery Solutions

Every business is at constant risk of data loss or destruction, whether due to drastic causes like ransomware attacks or mundane mishaps like software or hardware failure. Data backup and recovery solutions help you curtail the risk of data loss, forming an essential part of your comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. NexusTek offers backup management solutions that accommodate both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure, managed by experienced disaster recovery engineers who are there to assist when you need them.

Benefits of NexusTek’s data backup and recovery solutions include:

Preserves Data Integrity

Prevents permanent data loss or destruction through use of local and offsite cloud-based backups.

Customizable Backup Management

Whether you need backups of all data or only specific, business-critical portions, our engineer will work with you to determine a backup management plan that makes the most sense for your business.

Air-Gapped Environment

Offsite backups provide an extra layer of data protection against adverse events that may compromise your business’ primary network, like ransomware attacks or natural disasters.

Maintains Data Availability

NexusTek’s rapid data restoration minimizes downtime by restoring access to your data swiftly

Ease of Use

NexusTek’s data backup management engineers handle everything, from deploying the backup software, to scheduling and monitoring daily backups, to emergency data restorations.

Supports Cyber Insurance Qualification

A robust data backup management and recovery program helps businesses to qualify for cyber insurance policies by showing due diligence to prevent data loss.

Stores Data Securely

Highly secure cloud-based or on-premises storage protects data backups against unauthorized access.

Wondering About the Real Cost of Downtime for Your Business?

Business Downtime Infographic
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Frequently Asked Questions

Why are offsite backups important in a backup management plan?

As ransomware attacks have skyrocketed, offsite backups have become an essential layer of cyber resilience. This is because ransomware attackers know that if they can destroy or encrypt your data backups, they gain leverage in their extortion scheme. Because of this, it has become common for ransomware attackers to search for a victim’s backups first, before sending the ransom note. When you store a set of data backups in a location that is physically separate from your main network, ransomware attackers who penetrate your network are not able to locate them. This reduces the pressure on you as the victim, because you know that even though the attackers may destroy data from your main network, your offsite backups are safely out of their reach. With a backup management plan that includes offsite backups, you are no longer faced with the ugly dilemma of either losing your data to ransomware attackers or paying the ransom to receive the encryption key to decrypt your data. After containing the attack, your business can move forward with data recovery using your offsite backups and resume operations.

Is failover part of a business continuity plan?

Yes, failover is an integral part of a thorough business continuity plan. Failover refers to the use of redundant infrastructure to manage essential business processes in the event of system downtime. Business continuity planning identifies those mission-critical systems and then designates appropriate infrastructure that can be used in a failover situation. For example, systems like enterprise resource planning and supply chain management systems are likely to be identified as business-critical. If these systems are run in a server environment, you might plan to switch over to a redundant server if conditions impacted the functionality of the primary server. By integrating failover contingencies into your business continuity plan, you minimize the risk of downtime of essential systems.