As a sales engineer, I’m constantly having conversations with customers about BCP/DRP.

Not familiar with those acronyms?

You should be.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) describe a customers’ set of plans, actions, and policies for “keeping the lights on” during disruptive events.

What’s the difference?

In a Business Continuity event, the business is still operational, albeit very slowly. However, in a true Disaster Recovery event, business operations stop entirely. They’re different events, but they build on each other and can be detrimental to your business.

Whether you provide life-saving services in the healthcare industry or produce goods for business or personal consumption in manufacturing, disruptions can damage your business, your stakeholders, and your customers.

One of the more important conversations I have with customers is around BCP/DPR strategy. I live in South Florida, where hurricanes are a persistent threat for half the year, and many companies already have some sort of disaster recovery or business continuity plan in place.

But those plans can be different, depending on where you are. Here, businesses must consider the possibility of losing their entire data center in a Category 5 storm. If you live in the Northeast, you might have to plan for outages due to blizzards. And in the Midwest, it might be tornadoes. Then there are events like the COVID-19 outbreak. Just remember, the cause of the disaster is less important than the plans you have in place and how they’re regularly tested, communicated, updated, and ultimately deployed.

Let’s look at some things to consider when setting up a BC/DR plan.

Prepare Your People

This is always my top piece of advice: Train your people! There are important questions you must ask:

  • Will my users know what to do in the event of a disaster?
  • Are they physically safe?
  • Will they know where to go or how to access systems?
  • Will they help (or even hinder) the progress of getting the business back online?

People are the most important asset for most organizations. Communicate with your employees frequently, train them thoroughly, and make them part of your recovery plan. Consider cross training. Employees who are cross-trained in different areas of the business can be critical to helping keep the lights on, or in a DR scenario, getting operations back up and running.

Think Hard About the Parts of Your Business

Your business has many parts so you’ll probably need to implement plans based on different user groups, business units, locations, and regions. Remember, your BCP and DRP efforts should involve more than just IT. The purpose of this exercise is to determine which lines of business need to be immediately restored and which are less time-critical.

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Who are my essential users?
  • What systems do they need access to do their jobs?
  • What happens if they can’t access those systems?
  • What is our backup plan or contingency?
  • What systems or business units are in the immediate critical path?

Working with these different groups and profiles — and their unique needs in mind — will help you to organize your plans better so when it’s time to execute, you’ll be more than ready. So, plan and practice so you can execute efficiently.

Let’s Talk 9s

Nine days. According to FEMA, businesses that lose their IT for nine or more days have a 90 percent chance of filing for bankruptcy within 12 months. Disruptions can quickly become a slippery slope, and downtime can be incredibly costly to the business.

And nearly every customer I speak to wants 99.999 percent uptime — or higher — on all their critical systems, and rightfully so. But the tradeoff for that level of availability (assuming it’s even attainable) is cost. This is especially true when thinking about maintaining such a high level of availability for your entire site or data center (or even multiple data centers!).

Lately, the trend for a lot of my customers is active-active data centers. But when we dive deep here, the costs, maintenance, and other trade-offs (like profile management) that come with running a true active-active environment often deter customers.

Based on my experience, active-passive or hot/warm sites typically make more sense. Warm sites, which can go live quickly, help achieve balance between availability and cost. Data replication schedules determine just how fast these secondary sites can become active. Another approach is to follow an active-active-pinned model. Here, we may have two “hot sites” but avoid challenges like profile management by pinning a specific user to a certain data center.

So, which of these deployment models is right for you? Ultimately, that answer depends on your tolerance for risk, your resiliency to sustain downtime, and how much you can spend. Conducting a thorough financial analysis before formulating a plan will help you make more informed decisions.

BCP, DRP, and Citrix

One of the reasons why I geek out about working at Citrix is I get to have these impactful conversations with customers in nearly every industry. Citrix also happens to be really good at helping customers with BCP/DRP! For example, enabling secure, remote access in the event of a pandemic, increasing the security and resiliency of your network, providing user-centric analytics to report on and automatically respond to critical events, and a whole lot more.

Lately, I’ve had interesting discussions around Remote PC Access, which can be a great way to securely access existing, domain-joined PCs at the office without purchasing additional hardware. It’s helped a lot of my customers expedite their work-from-home strategies. Other features such as Autoscale, enable you to elastically burst within public clouds when resources get consumed and then power down those machines just as fast. Both of these business continuity-focused tools are included with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service and Citrix Workspace Premium Plus.

Learn more about how Citrix is helping its customers maintain business continuity. You can also download our white paper to learn best practices for a complete business continuity strategy and how Citrix technologies provide secure access to apps and data on any device, over any network or cloud.