What is business continuity?
Business continuity is all about keeping your organization running smoothly during unexpected disruptions—whether it’s a technical glitch, human error, power outage, cyberattack, or even a natural disaster. When it comes to data storage, business continuity ensures your systems and processes are designed to prevent data loss and minimize downtime.
What is a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan (BCP) is your organization’s playbook for staying operational during disruptions. Think of it as a roadmap that outlines how to prepare for, respond to, and recover from unexpected events. A solid BCP focuses on minimizing downtime, reducing operational impact, and enabling a quick recovery.
Key elements of a business continuity plan include:
- Defined roles and responsibilities: Who does what during a disruption.
- Recovery processes: Step-by-step instructions to restore critical functions.
- Resource allocation: Tools, technologies, and people needed to keep things running.
Integrating modern storage and data management technologies into your BCP can significantly boost your organization’s resilience. Here’s what to include:
Core components of a Business Continuity Plan
1. Backup and data replication
Your business can’t function without its data. Backup and replication technologies are the backbone of data protection and recovery.
- Backup Regularly scheduled copies of your data ensure you have a recent version available if the original is compromised.
- Full backup: A complete copy of all data. It’s thorough but can be time-consuming and storage-intensive.
- Incremental backup: After an initial full backup, only changes are saved. This method is faster and more storage-efficient.
- Pro tip: Use immutable, indelible backups to ensure your data can’t be altered or deleted.
- Data replication Real-time copying of data from one location to another.
- Synchronous replication: Writes data to both locations simultaneously, ensuring zero data loss but requiring high-performance storage.
- Asynchronous replication: Writes data to the primary location first, then replicates it to the secondary location. It’s less resource-intensive but may involve slight delays.
Your choice of backup and replication methods depends on your recovery goals:
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How much data loss is acceptable?
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How quickly do you need to recover?
2. Disaster Recovery (DR)
Disaster recovery is a critical part of business continuity. DR solutions use backup and replication to store data in a secure secondary location—whether that’s an offsite data center or a cloud platform like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
To ensure your DR plan works when you need it most:
- Test it regularly to identify gaps and make adjustments.
- Keep it updated to reflect changes in your IT infrastructure and business needs.
3. Ransomware protection
Ransomware attacks can bring your business to a standstill. Proactive ransomware protection can detect and respond to threats before they cause damage. And if an attack does succeed, having a clean, current backup ensures you can restore your data without paying a ransom.
To safeguard your backups:
- Store them in a secure, network-isolated location.
- Use Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) storage to create immutable backups that can’t be altered or overwritten.
4. Continuous availability
High-availability storage solutions ensure uninterrupted access to your data, even during hardware failures. These systems use multiple storage controllers across different data centers, so if one goes down, the other takes over seamlessly.
Synchronous replication is often used in these setups to ensure data is always up-to-date and accessible.
Why robust storage matters for business continuity
To maintain business continuity, look for storage solutions that:
- Create immutable, indelible backups.
- Efficiently replicate data across hybrid and multicloud environments.
- Protect and rapidly recover your data, applications, and infrastructure.
- Achieve the lowest possible RPO and RTO for critical systems.
- Detect, protect against, and recover from ransomware attacks.
- Offer high-availability configurations for uninterrupted operations.
Related NetApp solutions and resources
Products to explore:
- Snapshot: Fast, space-efficient data backups.
- SnapMirror: Seamless data replication for disaster recovery.
- BlueXP Disaster Recovery: Simplified DR for hybrid multicloud environments.
- Automatic Ransomware Protection: Built-in threat detection and response.
- MetroCluster: High-availability storage for continuous operations.
Resources to dive deeper:
