Become a Certified Disaster Recovery Professional
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Home / Cybersecurity / What is Disaster Recovery
A business continuity plan refers to the processes and procedures that experts follow to ensure status quo in the event of a disruption. Simply put, business continuity is an organization’s ability to maintain essential functions during and after a disruption has occurred. Disaster Recovery, on the other hand, is a subset of business continuity, which focuses more on keeping all engines of the business running despite the disaster.
With the COVID-19 outbreak, it is more critical than ever for businesses to deploy a robust business continuity plan to deal with any eventuality that they could be faced with, and how this plan will allow them to mobilize workforce and continue to run.
A business continuity plan is created based on business objectives, thereby helping an organization establish a more coordinated secured and continued operations. Business continuity plans help organizations deal with risk and adjust automatically to ensure continuous business operation –
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The business continuity plan is a blueprint to be referred during the crisis with defined strategies to deal with the effects. These key elements play a vital role in creating an effective business continuity plan.
How to Create an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan in 5 Steps?
Identifying Business Continuity Risks
Understanding IT infrastructure is required to identify business continuity risks. The key points to incorporate when determining their scope are –
Virtualization provides flexibility in disaster recovery. Here servers are virtualized independent from the underlying hardware. Therefore, an organization does not need the same physical servers at the primary site as at its secondary disaster recovery site.
“Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third party to provide failover in the event of a man-made or natural catastrophe. Typically, DRaaS requirements and expectations are documented in a service-level agreement (SLA) and the third-party vendor provides failover to a cloud computing environment, either through a contract or on a pay-per-use basis.” TechTarget
Perceived and unforeseen threats to operations are always a concern for business owners. In the event of a disaster, the continued operations of an organization depend on the ability of the business to replicate their IT systems and data.
Disaster recovery depicts all the steps involved in planning and adapting to a potential disaster with a plan in place to restore operations while minimizing the long-term negative impact. Good business continuity plans are important to keep a business up and running through interruptions of any kind, including power failures, IT system crashes and natural disasters, and more, thus limiting the short-term negative impact on the company.
A disaster recovery plan restores data and critical applications when business systems are unavailable.
A business continuity plan is more of a strategy. It enables operational continuance with minimal downtime and services, or outage.
The key difference can be identified when the plan is in the implementation stage. Business continuity enables operations to function during the event and aftermath. Whereas, disaster recovery defines how to respond to the event and to return to the normal business phase. While both functionally incorporate a measured response, disaster recovery aims to re-establish the business operations. Though a few areas overlap, they remain distinct in their operation.
Make sure your disaster recovery plan works when you need it!
An AI-enhanced plan can help strategists draft a better plan for disaster recovery. It uses techniques like ‘business impact analysis’ and ‘risk assessment.’
AI can be used to automate and control various parts of disaster recovery and business continuity plans. It does not only help prevent issues from arising, but also adapts to new data to make it predictive analysis effective.
AI can quickly analyze the reason behind the attack and can be programmed to initiate an auto-recovery action.
The more AI is exposed to data to handle downtime and outages, the better they will learn to register the issues of downtime.
AI can quickly analyze the reason behind the attack and can be programmed to initiate an auto-recovery action.
The concepts of business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) ensure continuity of business operations so that the organizations don’t need to face negative impacts. In order to continue the same, various technologies have entered the picture. Here are the few emerging technologies that will change the business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) landscape.
“94% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss do not survive – 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years.”
Effect on business continuity leading to a major loss.
Extreme financial and reputational loss.
The cost of a data breach creates an additional burden.
As an organization, taking precautions against any ill-advised act is a must. So is maintaining a sound disaster recovery plan, important to ensure business continuity.
Organizations spend a lot of money to build defensive security strategies, and yet they fail, leaving businesses vulnerable to the after-effects of security incidents. So, to build a risk and recovery plan for a cyberattack, firms need to plan ahead on how to stay prepared and protected from cyberattacks.
Tip 2
Involve the team in the attack mitigation plan.
Tip 3
Document, implement, and regularly update the recovery plan.
After the rapid spread of COVID–19, arguably, every organization around the world shifted its primary priorities dramatically. As a result, several concerns surfaced, such as disruption in the workforce, daily business operations, and supply chain. A recent report on “business responses to the COVID–19 outbreak” suggests, 51% of enterprises around the globe do not have a business continuity plan. Out of more than 300 businesses, half of the organizations are not ready to combat disasters. Well, with employees working remotely in the wake of coronavirus-themed attacks, companies need a sound IT disaster recovery and business continuity plan.
A certified and skilled cybersecurity workforce always helps strengthen an organization and implement strategic plans and principles to protect its assets. The role of a cybersecurity team majorly focuses on identifying, protecting, detecting, and responding to mitigate the gaps and vulnerabilities in the organization’s network. It is the responsibility of the cybersecurity team along with the disaster management team to implement the following:
A cybersecurity certified team (with a reputed certification like EDRP) to enable communication, collaboration, and co-operation in emergency/disaster management strategies to identify critical assets
The cybersecurity awareness and training programs help disaster recovery or emergency management teams disrupt two essential operational threats during emergencies
Disaster recovery IT management and cybersecurity teams work together to train the workforce, create awareness plans, maintain resilience, and enforce operational procedures in the organization.
The question that arises is – how to select the best disaster recovery training from the available choices? One can opt for any business continuity online training. However, there are several points to consider before enrolling in disaster recovery and business continuity programs because the overall objective of the program is to equip us with a skill set that helps us to create a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. The most common assumption while creating such a program is about the audience; only a very few business continuity training is designed in a way that is suitable for beginners, and on the other hand, a few BCP Certifications are designed only for experts.
Primarily, the business continuity plan (BCP) certification/ training must be taken from a well-recognized cybersecurity credentialing body, and secondly, the institution that offers the certifications should have attained globally recognized industry accreditations such as the ISO 17024. An organization must ensure that the course outline of a program they select is aligned with their organizational learning goals.
Here are some of the more popular Business continuity and Disaster Recovery certifications that are recognized by the industry:
CBCI by The Business Continuity Institute (BCI)
Business Continuity Management by Certified Information Security
BCLE 2000, BCP 501 & BCP 601 by DRI International, Inc.
EDRP provides a strong understanding of business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) principles. The program includes business impact analysis, assessing risks, developing policies and procedures, and implementing a plan. It also teaches professionals how to secure data by putting policies and procedures in place and how to recover and restore their organization’s critical data in the aftermath of a disaster.
Disaster recovery is becoming an increasingly important aspect of enterprise computing. As devices, systems, and networks become ever more complex, the number of things that can go wrong has increased exponentially. With the EDRP Certification, chances are that you will be the one helping the business recover every time disaster strikes. Isn’t that a good place to be?
A – Main steps involved in an IT disaster recovery plan are:
A – Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are two different strategies. A Business Continuity Plan ensures that regular business will continue even during a disaster. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity planning and involves restoring vital support systems like communications, hardware, and IT assets. Disaster recovery aims to minimize business downtime and focuses on getting technical operations back to normal in the shortest time possible.
A – Most business continuity certifications cover disaster recovery but only as a module in the program. If you are looking specifically for Disaster Recovery training, then BCP training won’t serve the objective. Alternatively, many disaster recovery programs also cover Business Continuity Planning.
A – Yes, EDRP training and exam are available online.
A – Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery roles demand the skill-set, which are very clearly taught in the EDRP program. It can easily be achieved through this certification. This is especially useful since many professionals gain skills with experience, but business continuity and disaster recovery certification help them grow faster in their career trajectory.
A – As per LinkedIn, there are more than 17,000 jobs in business continuity and over 25,000 in disaster recovery as of April 16th, 2020.
A – The average salary of Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Specialist is USD 80,781 (Source: payscale.com). Thus, it is safe to say that after IT disaster recovery training, you can command a good salary in the growing market.
A – EDRP is the best option because in this program, the combines both disaster recovery and business continuity with a major focus on disaster recovery.
A – EDRP is the best in class disaster recovery training for employees who are involved in securing the organization’s data by putting policies and procedures in place to recover and restore their organization’s critical data and business process in the aftermath of a disaster.