3 Legs of the BCP Stool

The “3 Legs of the BCP Stool” metaphor highlights the foundational aspects essential for a strong Business Continuity Plan (BCP). These legs represent critical components that support your plan’s effectiveness and resilience in the face of disruptions:

• Business Continuity Planning: Yes, the first leg is the same as the concept itself. This is all about the people, places, and processes. During an event, where do people go? What do they need to do to keep the business running? And what’s the plan for each department within an organization?

• Crisis Management: This includes physical safety, employee protection, and related communications. For example, how will you communicate with your staff during a severe weather alert, or relay information to the fire department or law enforcement during a fire or active shooter situation?

• Disaster Recovery (DR): The “things” part of a BCM program. How will you recover from a server failure? A network outage? A cryptovirus? Do you have backups or workarounds in place? What is the priority for systems recovery in the event of a disaster?

Understanding these elements is key to developing a comprehensive BCP strategy. While each component has its unique focus, they are all interconnected and must work together seamlessly during a crisis. It’s important to have a solid plan in place for each aspect and regularly revisit and update them as needed.

12 Professional Process Steps For Business Continuity Management

Without a thorough plan in place, many organizations fail to recover from a disaster. Luckily, we’ve developed twelve professional practice steps to a successful BCM program. Working through the steps is time-consuming, but investing the resources to develop, practice, and revisit a BCP will put you in a position to navigate unexpected outages, natural disasters, or dangerous workplace events.

1. Program Initiation and Management

Establish the need for a BCM Program (and identify the program components) by gaining a clear understanding of your risks and vulnerabilities. This can be through the development of resilience strategies, response, restoration, and recovery plans.

The main objectives of this professional practice are to obtain leadership’s support and funding—then you can start to build the organizational framework and develop the BCM program.

2. Risk Evaluation and Control

Identify the risks/threats and vulnerabilities that are both inherent and acquired which can adversely affect your organization, its resources, or its image. Once identified, threats and vulnerabilities will be assessed as to the likelihood that they would occur and the potential level of impact result.

Your business can then focus on high-probability and high-impact events to identify where controls, mitigations, or management processes are non-existent, weak, or ineffective. This evaluation results in recommendations from the BCM Program for which additional controls, mitigations, or processes should be implemented to increase resiliency from the most commonly occurring and/or highest-impact events.

3. Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

During this step, your organization should identify the likely and potential impacts of events on your business or its processes. Moreso, the criteria that will be used to quantify and qualify such impacts. This includes the following:

• Financial Effect
• Operational Effect
• Customer Effect
• Regulatory Compliance
• Reputational Impacts

The criteria to measure and assess these impacts must be defined and accepted, then used consistently to define each organizational process’s Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The result of this analysis is to identify time-sensitive processes and the requirements to recover them in an acceptable timeframe.

4. Business Continuity Strategies

Use the data collected during Risk Evaluation and BIA to identify available continuity and recovery strategies for your organization’s operations and technology. Recommended strategies must be approved and funded, and must meet both the recovery time (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) identified in the BIA.

You should also perform a cost-benefit analysis on the recommended strategies to align the cost of implementing the strategy against the assets at risk.

5. Emergency Preparedness and Response

Develop and implement your organization’s plan to respond to emergencies—this may impact the safety of employees, visitors, or other assets.

The emergency response plan should document how your business will respond to emergencies in a coordinated, timely, and effective manner to address life safety and stabilization of emergencies until the arrival of trained or external first responders.

6. Business Continuity Plan Development and Implementation

The Business Continuity Plan is a set of documented processes and procedures that will enable your organization to continue or recover time-sensitive processes. This is usually created to allow processes to continue at the minimum level within the timeframe acceptable to the business.

In this phase of the Business Continuity Management Program, the relevant teams design, develop, and implement the approved continuity strategies and document the recovery plans to be used in response to an incident or event.

7. Awareness and Training Programs

A program is developed and implemented to establish and maintain awareness about the Business Continuity Management (BCM) Program and to train your organization’s staff so that they are prepared to respond during an event.

This training program should ensure staff members understand their roles and responsibilities in the event of an emergency or business disruption. The team will also regularly conduct mock exercises to test the effectiveness and readiness of the plan.

8. Business Continuity Plan Exercise, Audit, and Maintenance

To continue to be effective, a Business Continuity Management (BCM) Program must implement a regular recovery exercise schedule to establish confidence in a predictable and repeatable performance. As part of the change management program, the tracking and documentation of these activities evaluate the ongoing state of readiness.

This tracking will allow continuous improvement of your organization’s recovery capabilities and ensure that plans remain current and relevant. An audit process will also validate the plans are complete, accurate, and in compliance with organizational goals and industry standards.

9. Crisis Communications

Define the framework to identify, develop, communicate, and exercise a crisis communications plan. This plan should address how communications will be handled before, during, and after crises. The communications plan is developed collaboratively with your organization’s public information and internal information resources where they exist to ensure consistency of communication.

The plan should address the need for effective and timely communication between the organization and all the stakeholders impacted by an event or involved during the response and recovery efforts.

10. Coordinating with External Agencies

Establish policies and procedures to coordinate response, continuity, and recovery activities with external agencies at the local, regional, and, if necessary, national levels. But don’t forget to prioritize compliance with applicable statutes and regulations.

This also includes establishing a process to obtain mutual assistance support from and provide the same to other organizations when requested.

11. Program Improvement

The program must be evaluated and improved continually to ensure that it remains proactive.

Your organization should monitor industry trends, emerging threats, and the results of its own exercise program to identify potential gaps or other areas that require improvement. Regularly reviewing and updating policies, procedures, plans, and other documentation will ensure that your BCM Program is effective and continues to meet organizational goals.

12. Store, Update, and Distribute Your Plan Regularly

The Business Continuity Plan is a living document that must be regularly reviewed and updated to ensure it remains accurate and relevant. Follow these steps to ensure your plan maintains its effectiveness:

• Ensure all team members have access to the latest version of the plan, including any relevant updates or changes.
• Store the plan in a secure location.
• Test your backup procedures regularly to ensure they are functioning correctly.
• Perform annual reviews and audits to identify any necessary changes or improvements.
• Distribute the plan to all relevant team members, including new employees, and provide training on their roles and responsibilities in case of a disaster.
• Regularly communicate updates and changes to the organization to ensure everyone is aware of their roles and responsibilities in an emergency.

Start Managing the Right Way With Thrive

Diving into the process of business continuity management is best guided by experienced professionals who are familiar with the intricacies of these twelve steps. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you tackle your business continuity challenges.

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MSPs and Business Continuity Go Hand-in-Hand

MSPs are third-party companies that specialize in managing and maintaining a company’s IT infrastructure, applications, and other technology-related services. They work proactively to ensure their clients’ systems run smoothly, are secure from potential cyber threats, and quickly recover from disruptions or outages.

By partnering with IT-managed service providers, your business can delegate the management of complex IT environments—which frees internal resources to focus on core business functions. There’s no denying the fact that MSPs and business continuity go hand-in-hand.

How to Hire an MSP Who’ll Ensure Business Continuity

Hiring an MSP is a critical business decision that demands careful consideration. Before signing any contract, ensure they align with your business goals and have the expertise and experience to support your unique IT needs. Look for an MSP who can offer the following:

Optimal Security Measures

Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated, and businesses of all sizes are at risk. Reliable IT-managed service providers should have the tools to protect your systems from malware, ransomware, phishing attacks, etc. They should also proactively monitor your networks for vulnerabilities and provide prompt solutions when needed.

Ease of Access/Availability

System outages and disruptions can happen at any time. That’s why you need an MSP partner who’s available 24/7 to provide support and resolve issues quickly. Ensure they offer multiple contact options, including phone, email, chat, or a dedicated portal.

Scalability

As your business evolves, so do your IT needs. Your MSP should be able to scale its services and resources as needed without interrupting your operations.

Budget-Friendly Plans

MSPs offer a range of services with varying prices. Choose an MSP that offers plans that fit your budget without compromising on the quality of service.

Experience and Reputation

Choose an MSP with a proven track record of providing excellent services to businesses in your industry. Don’t hesitate to ask for references and reviews from their existing clients.

Thrive: Your Trusted IT Managed Service Provider

At Thrive, we understand the importance of business continuity. We offer reliable and comprehensive managed IT services so we can take care of your IT infrastructure. Our team of experts is available 24/7 to provide support and ensure your systems are running optimally. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your business thrive.

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Having a reliable BCDR plan can ensure that your business stays afloat in the case of an emergency. There are some key components that your backups and disaster recovery plan needs to include for your business to excel.

How Your Business Benefits From Having a BCDR Plan

About 40% of small and medium businesses fail to reopen after a natural disaster. That’s almost half of all businesses that aren’t able to get back on their feet!

Creating a backup and disaster recovery plan is much like constructing a lifeboat for your business. Just as a lifeboat is designed to keep passengers safe and afloat in the event of a shipwreck, a BCDR plan safeguards your business against unforeseen disasters and disruptions.

Having a thought-out plan can:

• Ensure Minimal Downtime: Your business operations can quickly resume after a disaster, minimizing downtime and mitigating the loss of revenue.
• Preserve Your Business’s Reputation: By swiftly recovering from a disaster, your business can demonstrate resilience and reliability, maintaining the trust of everyone involved in the company.
• Reduce Stress During a Crisis: With a well-laid plan, your team will know exactly what to do when a disaster strikes, reducing chaos and confusion.
• Protect Essential Data: You can include data backup strategies that help protect critical business data, preventing permanent loss and facilitating quick recovery.

With a well-constructed lifeboat—or a meticulous BCDR plan—your business will know exactly what to do to make sure you’re part of the 60% of businesses that stay open in the wake of a disaster.

Data Assessment

Identifying any crucial data that must be protected in the event of an emergency is one of the first steps in creating backups and disaster recovery plans. You might include customer information, financial records, and any sensitive information. By understanding what data your business needs to protect, you’ll be able to prioritize resources during a disaster.

Backup Strategies

Check that your business has backup frequency and retention policies. These can specify how long backups are kept, balancing storage costs, and historical data needs. Opt for daily backups to retain the most information, but weekly and monthly backups are an option, too.

Defining recovery objectives, including Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), can be a critical part of a backup and disaster recovery plan. RPO is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, while RTO is the duration for which a business process must be restored after a disaster.

Off-Site Storage and Redundancy

Storing backups in multiple physical locations mitigates the risk of a single point of failure. Also, redundancy can ensure your business has access to data even if one backup system fails—the more backups you can have, the safer your data will be.

Disaster Recovery Testing

Testing is an integral part of BCDR plans. Types of testing include full-scale tests, which simulate a real disaster event, partial tests, which focus on specific aspects, and tabletop tests, where the plan is discussed in a simulated group setting.

Communication and Notification

Don’t forget to establish clear communication channels so that everyone involved is aware of the current situation during a disaster. How will you notify stakeholders, employees, and customers about any subsequent actions? Transparency is the key to maintaining trust and confidence during crises.

Team Roles and Responsibilities

Clearly articulating individual roles and responsibilities can make certain that every team member knows what to do during a crisis—you could even put together a backup and disaster recovery team to manage an emergency event.

Documentation and Policies

Establishing well-documented policies and procedures is vital for the execution of your BCDR plan. This documentation serves as a comprehensive guide for your team during a crisis, outlining all necessary steps and actions. Without clear instructions documented for employees to follow, the structure can quickly fall away with the chaos and stress of a disaster.

Security Measures

24% of data breaches in 2023 involved ransomware, almost doubling the amount in 2022. Considering the surge in data breaches, it’s crucial to implement security measures to protect you from unauthorized access and safeguard your business data.

Implementing encryption is one measure to store data in a secure format, protecting any information even if it falls into the wrong hands.

Having access controls to limit the number of people who can access your backups also reduces the risk of accidental or intentional data loss.

Compliance and Regulation

Do you know the applicable regulations your business is required to adhere to? These regulations often depend on the nature of your business and the type of data you handle.

Here are a few key ones that many SMBs need to adhere to:

• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): This regulation protects patients’ medical records and other personal health information provided to health plans, doctors, hospitals, and other healthcare providers.
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX): Businesses in the financial sector need to adhere to SOX, which sets rules for corporate responsibility and provides measures to prevent accounting fraud.
• Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA): This regulation aims to protect government information, operations, and assets against natural or man-made threats.

Compliance with these regulations can significantly mitigate legal risks; be sure to keep them in mind for an effective disaster recovery plan.

Partner With Thrive For a Proactive Recovery Plan

You may already have backups and disaster recovery plans in place that need adjustments, or you may be taking the first steps to create a plan. Either way, Thrive offers consultation, an offsite data center, and proactive testing to guarantee your business stays open in the event of an emergency.

Contact one of our certified technicians today to get started.

The post The Key Components of Backups and Disaster Recovery Plans appeared first on Thrive.

Hurricanes unleash havoc, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. However, it’s not just physical structures that bear the brunt; business productivity can also be swept away, no matter if operations are in-person, hybrid, or fully remote. According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime comes out to about $5,600 per minute, adding up to around $300,000 per hour. The financial implications of losing vital business data during a hurricane are a nightmare no organization wants to face.

Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS, comes to the rescue when the storm hits and a fast resumption of IT services is needed. Disaster recovery services act as a reliable guardian, ensuring the safety and availability of your data, even in the face of adversity. How does it work? DRaaS leverages automated processes to replicate your data and infrastructure in secure off-site locations, away from the hurricane’s path.

Why DRaaS Is Essential during Hurricane Season:

• Swift Recovery: Time is of the essence during a crisis. DRaaS facilitates rapid recovery by offering near-instantaneous failover, enabling your business to resume operations swiftly and reduce downtime tenfold.
• Data Integrity: Hurricanes pose a threat not only to physical infrastructure but also to data integrity. DRaaS ensures continuous data backups and storage in multiple locations, safeguarding your information and facilitating seamless recovery, even in the event of severe on-premises damage.
• Cost Savings: The financial impact of hurricanes can be severe, with substantial post-disaster expenses. Adopting DRaaS not only protects your data but also your bottom line. By eliminating the need for costly hardware and infrastructure, as well as minimizing downtime and data loss expenses, DRaaS provides significant cost savings.
• Compliance and Trust: In a data-driven world, regulatory compliance and maintaining customer trust are paramount. DRaaS solutions often incorporate built-in security measures and encryption protocols, ensuring data security and enabling compliance with industry standards and legal requirements.

Preparedness in the wake of hurricane season means safeguarding your data. With its ability to facilitate swift recovery, ensure data integrity, provide cost savings, and ensure compliance, Thrive’s DRaaS emerges as a critical tool in protecting your data during hurricanes and other disasters that may hit. By working with you to understand your Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), the Thrive team can craft the right DRaaS solution for your business. 

Secure your data with DRaaS and fortify your business against the storms of uncertainty, contact Thrive today! 

The post Riding Out the Storm: Protect Your Data With DRaaS this Hurricane Season appeared first on Thrive.

According to Gartner, the world’s leading research company, the downtime spent on disaster recovery can cost companies $5,600 per minute, or nearly $340,000 an hour! In today’s highly competitive market, that’s just not acceptable

To mitigate downtime and the loss of productivity and revenue that comes with it, organizations need to practice preparedness for disaster recovery; being prepared is the best defense against downtime. This means having a strong business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan. To build a strong BCDR plan, of course, you’re going to need metrics.

Why You Need to Set and Track Metrics for Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Metrics offer business leaders important and accurate information about their organization and its processes, from marketing to IT. Applying metrics to your business continuity and disaster recovery plan objectives is just as important – if not more so – as this data offers disaster preparedness. Metrics, as part of a BCDR plan, help organizations to:

• Monitor the current state of IT
• Identify potential issues
• Prescribe corrective action
• Measure the results

Through BCDR metrics, organizations can create pre-defined IT processes for disaster recovery frameworks, and requirements for them, and identify objective variances from their goals. This makes BCDR metrics the basis for improvement, helping to estimate and eliminate operational vulnerabilities and downtime impacts. In addition, metrics offer insight into IT efficiencies and compliance with regulations and conformance to standards.

Two important disaster recovery plan metrics that comprise any solid BCDR plan are RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective).

What is RTO?

RTO, or Recovery Time Objective, is the metric that defines the time it takes for your IT infrastructure and services to get back online following a disaster. It requires calculating how quickly you need to recover operations so you can determine what preparations will be necessary.

What is RPO?

RPO, or Recovery Point Objective, is the metric of how much data a business can afford to lose, as well as how long it can take between the last data backup of a business’s system and the disaster event without causing serious business repercussions

What is the Difference Between RTO and RPO?

Since RTO is the measured timeframe in which applications and systems must be restored following a disaster, IT leaders should be measuring RTO from the very moment an incident occurs, not from the moment that their team begins correcting the issue. This approach provides them with knowledge of the exact point at which users start to be impacted.

On the other hand, RPO looks at how much data an organization can lose before it begins to impact business operations. For example, consider an online retailer. Now, not all are created equally. For a small mom-and-pop operation with only a handful of orders coming in per day, a few hours of lost data may not cost them any business at all. So, conducting data backups a couple of times a day may be fine; however, for a behemoth like Amazon, two hours of downtime could be devastating for their eCommerce and to their reputation, so backups may be needed on the minute.

So what do RTO and RPO have in common? Ideally, the numbers should be as close to zero as possible. Of course, the closer they are to zero, the greater the investment in IT experts, software, or other equipment will be.

Defining RTO vs RPO Values

As our earlier example illustrated, recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) are not one-size-fits-all when it comes to disaster recovery plans. Organizations are different in size and industry; for example, while that small retailer may be able to play loosely with its metrics, a hospital – where lives are at stake – likely cannot afford any downtime.

That said, one common disaster recovery strategy is to divide applications and services into various tiers and set RTPO values according to the service-level agreements (SLAs) that they have committed to.

By classifying the protection of data, organizations can identify the best method of storing, accessing, protecting, recovering, and updating data based on specific criteria to mitigate damages. For example, an organization may opt for a three-tier BCDR model:

• Tier-1: Mission-critical applications requiring an RTPO of less than 20 minutes
• Tier-2: Business-critical applications requiring RTO of 1 hour and RPO of 4 hours
• Tier-3: Non-critical applications requiring RTO of 8 hours and RPO of 24 hours

To create these tiers, an organization would need to closely examine their applications and services to identify which drive the business, generate revenue, and are essential to operations. This is called business impact analysis (BIA), and it all comes back to – you guessed it – metrics.

Lower Your Disaster-Related Downtime with Thrive

Once you’ve ranked your applications and services to determine the impact they will have on your business, you may be looking for a way to protect them after a disaster strikes. Look no further than Thrive. We offer a safe and secure path to the cloud, with bundled or customized options, and are hyper-aware of the devastating effects of disasters and downtime. That’s why we:

• Are located away from coastlines, outside flood zone/wind-blown debris zone in CAT 3–CAT 5 Hurricane-rated structures with fire protection
• Use redundant N+1 generators, Uninterrupted Power Sources (UPS), and Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) Units
• Use dual authentication security (HID, PIN, and/or biometric), motion security cameras, and have alarmed man-traps

With Thrive, your data is safe Contact the experts at Thrive to discuss your disaster recovery plan options.

The post What is the Difference Between RTO and RPO? Two Metrics You Need in Your Disaster Recovery Plan appeared first on Thrive.

Figure Out What All Potential Threats Look Like

The first step toward figuring out your business’ continuity plan is to consider the types of disasters you will be facing. This means that you need to perform an analysis of all the potential threats your organization could face, no matter how unlikely they might seem. Granted, you should lend more credence to the most likely of disasters, but you can’t rule anything out. Otherwise, you could be ignoring a glaring hole in your plan.

Basically, we’re not telling you to plan for when an asteroid levels your office, but we are telling you to have a strategy in place to account for physical damage or power loss to your office. Your business continuity plan should be specific enough to address the most likely issues you’ll face, but flexible enough to account for other less likely incidents, too.

Determine Your Business’ Benchmarks

No matter the disaster, your organization will have critical data and systems that need to be recovered. It’s up to you to determine what they are and how you will prioritize them. This will help you when it comes to responding to these disasters.

What it boils down to is knowing your various systems’ maximum tolerable downtime, or MTD. This is how long a system can remain down before permanent damage is done to your business. Knowing this number gives you more flexibility and room for making important decisions in the event of a disaster. Your MTD can also help to inform your RTO and RPO, or your recovery time objective and recovery point objective, respectively. These metrics help you better prepare for a disaster by establishing how often a backup should be taken and how long it will take for you to restore said backup.

Test, Revise, and Test Your Plan Again

Your disaster recovery solution will only be successful if you have multiple people working in tandem to ensure that it happens regularly and effectively. Otherwise, if the disaster renders that one person responsible for the strategy unavailable, you’ll be left in dire straits. On the other side of things, the more people involved means more can get done, and the work is easier to achieve.

This is why it helps to have a hierarchy of people responsible for various parts of your plan; if one key person is unable to pull off the full plan, then at least certain other aspects of your continuity strategy will go off without a hitch. Furthermore, these processes should be written out to make them as accessible and easy-to-follow as possible.

After you have your Small business continuity plan mapped out, you should routinely test it to make sure that it works properly. This will help you in the event you actually need to use it, as you can be confident that the plan works as it should. It will also help you determine where weaknesses in your strategy lie.

Nobody Likes to Think About Business Disasters, But They Need to Be Anticipated

We have plenty of recommendations to provide for your business’ continuity plan, contact Thrive!

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Begin By Establishing the Worst-Case Scenario

To begin, it is important to have an idea of what a disaster—any disaster—might look like for your business. Put some thought to it: what is the absolute worst thing that could realistically happen to your business? Might the office be flooded? Maybe some poor workmanship in the electricals sparks a fire, or the old, neglected building next door finally collapses and takes out part of your office, where you just so happened to keep your business’ servers?

Let’s amp up the trouble a bit and assume that whatever disaster struck (flood, fire, or falling building) left your office a total loss and, to make matters worse, took a key manager or other high-level employee with it. In addition to the personal loss, this would likely create some challenges for your business moving forward.

Whatever the Scale, You Need to Be Prepared to Deal with Disasters

Whether the loss is of a single spreadsheet or a key member of your business or your business’ physical location, you need to have the means to bounce back. For this, we always recommend that a business prepare a business continuity plan.

What is a Business Continuity Plan?

You should consider a business continuity plan to be your business’ saving grace in any disaster scenario. Its entire goal is to help ensure your company has a future, that you can resume operations if and when the chips are down.

To do so, your business continuity plan will need to cover a few different aspects of your company. There are your operational aspects, of course, including your technology and your other resources, as well as your human resources to consider.

All things considered, the baseline business continuity plan will cover:

• Data required to facilitate operations
• Technology needed to access that data
• An office location or contingency plan for hosting operations
• A chain of command in the event of a disaster
• A strategy that is accessible to all employees involved in the restoration process

We Can Help You Get Started!

We’ll help you put together a strategy that will ensure that you can make it, regardless of the disaster your business faces, assisting you with the planning process and implementing the technology required to enact it. To get started, contact Thrive today!

The post Plan for the Worst – Achieve the Best appeared first on Thrive.

While these terms are often used interchangeably, there are notable differences between the two, which is why it’s critical to have both plans in place to help mitigate the impact to business operations.

A business continuity plan refers to how a business continues to operate when key systems are down or an outage occurs. A disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, refers to how specific platforms, data, and applications are restored following a cyber attack, disaster, or other failure. At Thrive, we understand the needs of businesses and stress the importance of having actionable business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place.

Business Continuity Plan: A Must-Have for Every Organization

A March 2020 study from Mercer concluded that 51% of businesses did not have a business continuity plan in place to combat a global emergency, such as Covid-19. For many organizations, this lack of planning meant loss of revenue, unexpected expenditures to support a remote workforce, or loss of market share as better prepared competitors took advantage of their ability to adapt. Business continuity plans keep a business running effectively, even when faced with an unexpected disaster, and they’re a must-have for organizations across nearly every industry.

The goal of a business continuity plan is to know what processes can be kept in place when a disaster occurs, and which ones must be adapted. At Thrive, we stress two important terms when helping our customers to hone and craft a business continuity plan:

• Recovery Timeline Objective (RTO) – The time it takes systems to fully recover
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – The amount of data loss acceptable to a business

It must be plainly understood across departments within an organization where data is stored, what applications are in use, who stores the data, and who has access to it.

With a proper plan in place, it’s easier for everyone to know how to react should disaster strike. A plan allows you to prioritize what’s important – for instance, not being able to access email isn’t as critical as losing customer data that allows you to finalize an order or payment.

And, as our CIO Michael Gray outlined in a previous blog post, it’s worth the time to perform a tabletop exercise, which can help organizations identify and prepare for various scenarios, when it comes to business continuity planning.

Putting a Disaster Recovery Plan in Place

A disaster recovery plan refers to the specific part of the business continuity plan to be followed during and after data loss. It’s most important to get systems back up and running following a data loss event, in an effort to minimize downtime and business disruption.

As Thrive works with organizations, we tend to find there are on-premises and Cloud systems, along with SaaS applications, carrying various backup platforms. Our team can assist in testing these backup systems to see if they match what is laid out in the business continuity plan.

We understand that designing and executing a disaster recovery plan can be limited by budget, technology, resources, and staff on site, which is why our Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a strong solution for many businesses. We will partner with your IT team to create a comprehensive plan allowing for backup of data and the IT infrastructure in a third-party Cloud environment. This makes it easier to access IT infrastructure following a disaster.

At Thrive, we will partner with you to create a comprehensive business continuity plan that extends to include disaster recovery planning. Get in touch with our experienced team to explore Thrive’s targeted solutions for your organization.

The post How Is a Business Continuity Plan Different than a Disaster Recovery Plan? appeared first on Thrive.

While the popularity of DPaaS continues to grow among managed service providers, government agencies are also realizing that DPaaS offers numerous advantages when providing secure IT services for internal organizations. To fully take advantage of this service, learn more about what exactly DPaaS is, why the market is rapidly expanding, and how government organizations can harness its value for the best results, continue reading below.

Why is Data Protection Essential for Government Agencies?

The current IT landscape is constantly evolving, with malicious attackers continually devising new ways to attack. Data protection safeguards data from compromise, loss, or corruption, which could include virus and malware attacks, identity theft, scams, and more. Since government organizations may contain sensitive information that is not intended for the public, a security breach could put the privacy of officials, clients, and sensitive data at risk.

With ever-expanding advancements in data protection technology, malicious attackers are also developing new ways to compromise information. In the first six months of 2019 alone, data breaches exposed 4.1 billion records. Since then, the need for data protection has only grown more apparent. With the COVID-19 pandemic further accelerating cyberattacks and data breaches, government organizations need the best protection to prevent a potentially devastating attack. A recent survey found that almost half (46%) of global businesses have experienced at least one cybersecurity incident since moving to a remote workforce due to COVID-19 lockdowns, while the FBI has reported that the number of attack complaints in their Cyber Division has reached as many as 4,000 a day – a 400% increase from pre-COVID-19 months. With malicious software continuing to grow as a threat, government agencies need continuously comprehensive data protection to prevent the risk of data being compromised.

What is DPaaS?

Data protection as a service (DPaaS) is what it sounds like, a cloud-based service for protecting organizational data. With DPaaS, organizations can secure archival data for long-term retention requirements and enable quick data recovery in the event of a disruption to avoid business interruption. The service also provides enhanced security and stability for when your data is most vulnerable.

When compared to buying storage hardware and paying to keep it operational, DPaaS is an affordable option. Organizations pay a monthly subscription for the peace of mind that they have everything they need to recover their data.

How Does DPaaS Work?

DPaaS can secure sensitive information by creating copies of the data and storing it in a separate location. This can include online in the cloud, or through an external device. Providers offering DPaaS may also include additional options to enhance data protection, including VPNs, firewalls, system health monitoring, incident response, and audits.

DPaaS is ideal for organizations facing the following challenges:

• Backups often fail
• Backup windows often run into the next day
• Multiple backup solutions need to be managed
• Backup space constantly needs to be freed up

Under the umbrella of data-related as-a-service offerings includes disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), backup as a service (BaaS), and storage as a service (STaaS). These services offer government organizations the protection they need in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Top Drivers Growing the DPaaS Market

The DPaaS market is predicted to have accelerated growth as more organizations accept the cloud and services-based storage options, as well as the continued operational challenges due to malicious attackers. The service is predicted to reach nearly $29 million by 2022, with a CAGR of 31.5% from 2016 to 2022. Several drivers of the growing global data protection services market include growing concerns of data loss, the increasing need for data backups, and the integration of recovery and backup services.

Data loss due to disruption can be devastating for government organizations in terms of costs, and the consequences from lost sensitive data. DPaaS offers tools that can prevent loss and mitigate disruptions if they indeed occur and makes retrieving earlier versions of files much more efficient when compared to traditional backup methods.

These advantages have led to the increasingly rapid adoption of cloud computing and the soaring of the DPaaS market to be a $46 billion industry by 2024. As more organizations desire management and high scalability for their services, the DPaaS market will only grow.

DPaaS Benefits for Government Agencies

Government agencies, in particular, have much to take advantage of from DPaaS services. Here are some of the benefits of choosing DPaaS for government solutions. By encompassing backup and disaster recovery, data protection, and storage, DPaaS allows for a resilient data protection approach that can be scaled as your demands evolve.

Faster Backup & Recovery Process

Whether it’s due to a natural disaster, or a malicious human actor, disruptions are inevitable. When they do happen, government agencies need to be back up and running in no time! One of the most valuable benefits DPaaS delivers is a quick and resilient backup and recovery process to avoid extended downtime. Hosted cloud backups run continuously, enabling an accurate and quick backup when needed.

Reduced Overall Costs

When budgets are tight and you need to optimize what funds you have available for IT, you want to prioritize the areas that need it most. Choosing DPaaS as a cloud-based solution from a trusted advisor is an efficient and budget-friendly option. Instead of having to allocate large portions of funds to keep off-site facilities operational, DPaaS only requires a monthly service fee charged by a provider who manages the operation – freeing up your own internal team.

Enhanced Data Protection

Choosing DPaas services from a trusted provider allows your government organization to take advantage of resilient and agile data protection. In today’s current IT climate, managing data protection is essential, but many internal teams can be overwhelmed when balancing data protection and the organization’s own strategic initiatives. Being overworked or understaffed in IT makes your entire agency vulnerable.

Depending on what your unique needs are, your DPaaS strategy can include everything from:

• Both local and remote storage hardware
• IT support
• Licensing
• Regularly scheduled test restores
• System health monitoring
• Incident response (failed jobs)
• Request response (restores)
• Software and hardware upgrades
• Co-management
• Immutable copies to prevent data loss
• Reporting
• Audits to ensure all data is protected

Additionally, choosing a DPaaS provider not only allows your government organization to enjoy secure data protection, but also receive the expertise and vigilance of IT professionals who can help with compliance concerns and expert advice regarding your data.

Leverage DPaaS Powered by Thrive in Your Government Agency!

Thrive has been supporting government agency IT needs for years. Thrive’s Data Protection as a Service offering provides backup and restore capabilities of your data that are integral to your organization, including physical, virtual, NAS, office 365, etc. Wherever you store your data – on-site, off-site, in the private or public cloud, or even in hybrid environments – Thrive can deliver the protection you need. For systems of all sizes, Thrive ensures ready, reliable access to your sensitive information.

For more information on how Thrive can provide your government organization with the data protection you need for today’s ever-evolving IT environment contact our team of experts today.

The post How Government Agencies Can Benefit from DPaaS appeared first on Thrive.

In 2020, we saw an increase in the demand for services during the Coronavirus pandemic. It’s more clear now than ever that a disaster recovery plan is essential in ensuring services are not interrupted. When coupled with those who’d seek to take advantage of an overwhelmed system and exploit any vulnerabilities, protecting data and ensuring continuity should be focal points of any disaster recovery plan.

What is Disaster Recovery?

For many years, disaster recovery strategies focused predominantly on the procedures required to ensure that the physical infrastructure of a network or system would remain intact and/or recoverable should there be a disaster, whether natural or caused by humans. However, as technology services have grown and expanded, including the introduction of cloud computing which means physical infrastructure may be off-premises, disaster recovery plans have similarly grown to encompass much more.

In short, disaster recovery includes all plans, procedures, people, and tools needed to ensure that technological systems, both physical and logical networks, that are required to maintain critical infrastructure are capable of either continuing to run or be fully recovered should a disaster strike.

Components of an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan

In creating a disaster recovery plan, it’s essential to include all aspects of what makes your system run, what puts it at risk, and who needs to be involved.

1. Create your disaster recovery team.

Identify organizational leaders who have knowledge of both your IT infrastructure as well as government critical systems and processes. While your IT professionals are a critical component of this team, you’ll also want to be sure you include individuals who are skilled at managing teams during a crisis, prioritizing and delegating tasks, effectively communicating next steps and needs, and both identifying and removing obstacles to progress. Further, you want to include someone whose focus is strategic to ensure organizational continuity. And finally, you want to make sure you have enough skilled team members to implement plans.

2. Identify risks in your organization.

It’s hard to develop a plan if you don’t know what you’re up against. First, you’ll want to consider potential natural disaster risks; this is especially true if your organization or the data center it partners with is located in a high risk area. However, your plan should also consider potential human-caused disasters as well as catastrophic technology failures. Each potential risk will require different responses and will likely be feasible within different timeframes.

3. Identify top priority systems, data, applications, and resources.

The first part of your plan, if continuity of service is possible, is to ensure access to these critical resources remains open so the organization can continue to perform its duties. This is vital for government organizations who, in many cases, must continue to provide services to citizens in need in the case of a widespread disaster. In contrast, if those applications cannot run, the data is not accessible, and systems are not running, it is vital that there be a plan to not only restore their function, but potentially fully recover them as well.

4. Determine data backup procedures.

In order to restore and recover, you’ll need to determine the 4 w’s of your critical infrastructure. What gets backed up? By whom? Where? When (how often)?  You’ll want to make sure the appropriate team members have access to this information and that those backup facilities also have a disaster plan in place. Ensuring that this backup process is followed, regardless of how secure a system feels, is vital.

5. Maintain, update, test.

A disaster recovery plan is only as effective as an organization’s maintenance of that plan. That means you’ll need to test it to analyze where there are vulnerabilities and gaps in the communication or even the plan itself. Regular reviews and testing will allow your organization to update your plan as needed.

Why Government Agencies Need a Disaster Recovery Plan Now More Than Ever

Rampaging wildfires. Violent hurricanes. Unprecedented flooding. A worldwide pandemic. All of these disasters have happened within the last 5 years, and have been responsible for significant destruction of not just buildings and homes, but entire communities. In fact, from 2015-2018 alone, 15 different disasters resulted in over a billion dollars worth of damage. And FEMA asserts that now is the time for us to take proactive measures. This includes your disaster recovery plan, especially as a government agency upon which many people rely.

While natural disasters can happen anywhere, there are places that are more prone to them, including California, one the United States’ most populous states and home to Silicon Valley, the epicenter of much of America’s technology. While we can predict the likelihood of disasters and are getting better at forecasting risks, 2020’s global pandemic taught us that we are fallible. That in the face of predictions, we were still susceptible and so we must be prepared.

With the economy grinding to a halt, critical health infrastructure on overload, supply chain interruptions, and an increased demand on government agencies overseeing those sectors as well as social safety nets, many caught a glimpse of what load agencies could bear and would need to bear. It was, for many, a quick lesson in what critical organizational needs would need to be part of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.

But that’s not the only threat out there. The Solarwinds Orion Supply Chain attack demonstrated how vulnerable even government systems can be to hackers and those who seek to disrupt services by a DDoS attack. When coupled with statistics that suggest ransomware attacks increased by 715% in 2020, being prepared for all disasters, natural and manmade, is essential.

What is DRaaS?

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is when at least a portion of your disaster recovery is outsourced to a service provider who has considerable expertise in overseeing continuity plans as well as recovery for critical systems and infrastructure. Using a managed cloud infrastructure, your partner ensures essential and valuable tools and resources are replicated in the cloud so, when needed, you can shift your operations to a full backup and keep working through the disaster, when people need you most.

Top 3 Reasons Government Agencies Should Leverage DRaaS

While one of the primary reasons is obvious (having a reliable partner who has expertise in backup and recovery offers peace of mind), there are a few other great reasons for government agencies to use DRaaS to ensure that critical government information and services are able to continue to perform when they’re needed.

1. Reduce Overall IT Costs

It’s no secret that budgets are tight across the board, whether you’re an NGO or government agency, and being able to prioritize funding for the areas that need it most should be mission critical. Therefore, the likely expenditure required to fully replicate your system, in a safe off-site location, is expensive. Further, there’s the maintenance and upkeep of that facility that’s likely a much larger drain on a budget than a monthly service fee charged by a provider, which also moves that budget spend from CAPEX to OPEX.

2. Increase Data Recovery Speeds And Efficiency

With today’s DRaaS models, organizations can be brought back up and running in no time, to ensure quick data recovery whether facing an attack from malware or Mother Nature. A hosted cloud backup can run continuously, ensuring the integrity and accuracy of your backups. Similarly, when you need to recover, you can do so quickly.

3. Free Up Your Valuable IT Resources

Time is valuable. As noted above, disaster recovery and your disaster recovery plan must be exhaustive and that takes time, effort, and resources, including human resources. It’s likely that your IT team, as well as your leadership team, have other priorities and this frees them up to focus on those. There’s no need to worry about a secondary site, backups, or the infrastructure and expenditures to manage those. Allow your team to prioritize your mission, while your provider prioritizes your disaster recovery.

How DRaaS Can Prevent Government Breaches and DDoS Attacks

In talking about disaster recovery, we tend to focus on catastrophic natural events and potential infrastructure events (power outages) that could impact systems and networks. However, one of the biggest threats before any IT department is a malicious actor desirous of taking out or taking down a system. Unfortunately, we’ve learned recently that even adherence to government compliance rules doesn’t secure your data or systems. Malware, ransomware, breaches and DDoS attacks can have the same impact as a natural disaster, costing you valuable time, money, and resources. In fact, more and more security breaches and attacks are being classified as disasters.

For nearly half of the business sector respondents, the service disruption caused by a cyberattack is the biggest impact. So, what’s the best way to prevent this disruption? Having in place a secure, reliable, and efficient backup that moves into service when you need it, regardless of the cause.

Additionally, with DRaaS providers, you get the service, but you also get the expertise of IT professionals who can provide you with security advice, government compliance concerns, and best practices to secure your data. Further, these partners can likely provide data protection as well as looking at your existing environment to help you identify potential vulnerabilities. Further, that backup data is secured and supported by policies, procedures, and network infrastructure that ensure its integrity and safety.

Transform Security in Your Government Agency With Thrive’s Industry-Leading DRaaS Solutions

The most important element of your disaster recovery strategy, when you choose DRaaS, is knowing that your partner has the expertise to support and advise your team. You want to know that the solutions and services available can be tailored to your needs and still deliver the reliability and efficiency you require.

If the dangers of the modern IT landscape, whether natural, man-made, or malicious, are a concern for your organization, get in touch with us today so we can talk about how to protect your critical data today, tomorrow, and into the future, whatever challenges that might bring.

The post A Go-To Guide About DRaaS for Government Agencies appeared first on Thrive.