Although Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are sometimes used interchangeably, they are two distinct and different processes. Disaster Recovery (DR) is the immediate recovery of IT systems in the event of a disaster or other unforeseen event. Business Continuity (BC) on the other hand, is a plan to ensure that your business can still function following an unexpected event. In other words, it's a framework for preventing disruption of business operations due to adverse environmental events.

Data security has always been at the forefront of a business, but with the latest, not to mention drastic, uptick in security breaches, it's more important than ever.   Testing data security and data recovery is HUGE for a business.  Testing your disaster recovery plan helps determine the critical, business functions as well as the importance, and impact, those functions have on the business. Testing can expose the losses a business will retain when any of those functions are interrupted, or worse, halted.  It's important to know the best practices of security testing, but equally important, is having a plan in the event a breach occurs.  Hence the introduction of the Disaster Recovery Runbook.   

Digital Trust is a make or break for your business

In today’s digital world where most business is done online and data breaches are becoming more common, digital trust has become a valuable commodity for those companies that earn it. This phenomenon – where trust has become the currency of which businesses differentiate themselves from others – is starting to change the way businesses look at security. A report by CA Technologies, says that 86% surveyed said that security is more important to them than convenience when choosing a product or service online. What does Digital Trust mean? We do business with those whom we trust, but we do more business with those whom we trust more.

Once you are faced with the reality that your business operations have been compromised - time is of the essence. Having a thorough Disaster Recovery Plan will save you substantial amounts of time, money, and resources. A Disaster Recovery Plan (or runbook) is a working, living document that is unique to every organization - the business' specific blueprint on how to recover quickly and efficiently from a DR event. However, a lot of DR plans are not thorough enough to serve as any help during an actual disaster event.