What would happen to your business if your systems went down tomorrow - for a day, or a week? If you don't have a confident answer, you need a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan. Here's how to build one without the corporate jargon.

Business continuity vs disaster recovery

They're related but different:

  • Business Continuity (BC) is about keeping the whole business running during a disruption - people, processes, premises and communications.
  • Disaster Recovery (DR) is the IT-specific part: how you restore systems, data and applications after an incident.

You need both. Great IT recovery is no use if your staff have nowhere to work and no way to take calls.

Two terms you must understand: RTO and RPO

These two numbers drive the whole plan:

  • RTO (Recovery Time Objective) - how quickly you need to be back up and running. "We can survive being down for 4 hours, not 4 days."
  • RPO (Recovery Point Objective) - how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time. An RPO of 1 hour means you back up at least hourly.

Setting these honestly for each critical system tells you how robust (and how expensive) your solution needs to be.

Building your plan: the steps

  1. Identify critical functions - what absolutely must keep working (e.g. taking orders, answering phones, accessing customer data)?
  2. Assess the risks - hardware failure, ransomware, fire, flood, loss of internet or power.
  3. Set RTO and RPO for each critical system.
  4. Put protections in place - reliable 3-2-1 backups, redundancy, and cloud services that fail over automatically.
  5. Document the response - who does what, in what order, and how people are contacted.
  6. Don't forget communications - cloud phone systems can reroute calls instantly during an outage; see business continuity with hosted telephony.

Test it - then test it again

A plan that's never been tested is a guess. Run through scenarios at least annually: simulate a failure and confirm you can recover within your RTO. Testing reveals the gaps before a real disaster does.

The bottom line

A BCDR plan isn't about predicting disasters - it's about making sure they don't end your business. Define what's critical, set realistic recovery targets, protect accordingly, and test. Want help building or testing yours? Request a callback or explore our IT support service.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery?

Business continuity is the overall plan to keep your business operating during a disruption, while disaster recovery is the specific part focused on restoring IT systems and data.

What should a disaster recovery plan include?

It should cover your key systems, recovery time and recovery point objectives, who does what, where backups are held, and step-by-step recovery procedures that are tested regularly.

How often should we test our recovery plan?

Test at least once or twice a year and after major changes. An untested plan often fails when you need it most, so regular drills are essential.