What is BDR? Backup and Disaster Recovery Explained

Natural Disasters such as Hurricane Harvey remind us of the importance of BDR - Business Disaster Recovery.
Hurricane Harvey dumped over 50 inches of rain on Houston over 4 days in August 2017. IT is important to have Business Disaster Recovery (BDR) in place.

Backup and disaster recovery (BDR) is a combination of data backup and disaster recovery solutions that work cohesively to ensure a company’s business continuity and computer security.  Offsite cloud backups protect your data and with a Business Continuity plan, you can run your business from a remote location almost immediately after a disaster.

Why do I need Backup and Disaster Recovery?

Ask yourself, how long can my business survive without access to my data?  A catastrophic system failure creates chaos. Gone are billing and inventory records, customer lists, client data – . To recreate this information from scratch is expensive and time consuming. And depending on how much damage was done to the computer systems, it could be days, weeks or even months before operations return to normal, if at all.  If you don’t have an offsite backup, it only takes a fire, equipment failure, a malicious virus or human error to destroy all data.  If all of your backups are in the same location as the data, one event could destroy everything.

But my office hasn’t flooded or been damaged in any of the major storms to hit the Houston area.  I’m not worried about it.

Living and working in the Houston area, how many times have we heard that entire neighborhoods were damaged that had never been affected in previous storms?  Mother Nature has a way of reminding us that we are all vulnerable.  With our location near the Gulf Coast, our area is always at risk of severe storms and the damage that comes with them.  However, hurricanes and tropical storms are not the only concern. There are many reasons for loss of data.

Fire, Equipment failure, employees, viruses and Cyber-Attacks can all destroy your data at any time.  Just like all possessions in our lives, our data is at risk at all times.  Having  BDR in place, combined with a Business Continuity plan insures that your data will be safe and accessible to you should something happen.