Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) software helps organizations ensure they can recover as quickly as possible in the event of an incident such as a cyberattack, natural disaster, service provider outage, hardware failure, or data loss caused by human error.
There are two key components to BCDR software: business continuity and disaster recovery. Business continuity is all about preparing for an incident so that you can maintain business-critical operations during and after a disaster. It involves creating incident response plans, carrying out business impact analysis (BIA), and conducting risk assessments to identify which processes are essential for business operations. This allows IT and security teams to implement adequate protection to ensure those processes (and, by extension, the organization) can carry on in the event of an incident.
Disaster recovery is all about responding to an incident so the business can get back on its feet as quickly as possible once a disaster has occurred. It involves restoring IT systems, infrastructure, data, and applications as quickly and effectively as possible to minimize operational downtime and financial loss. This requires the organization have backups of their data stored in a separate location, so it won’t be affected by any disruption to their local network.
In this article, we’ll explore the best business continuity and disaster recovery software. We’ll look at features such as risk assessments, approval workflow automation, live status reporting, data backups and replication, and data recovery. We’ll give you some background information on each provider and the key features of solution, as well as the type of customer that they are most suited to. Note that, as BCDR is a relatively new concept, some of the solutions in this guide focus more on either business continuity management or disaster recovery.
Archer is a market-leading risk management provider that helps businesses identify, plan, and mitigate risk to improve security, governance, and compliance. Their solutions are trusted in 48 countries by organizations of all sizes, including over 50% of the Fortune 500. Archer Business Resiliency is their business continuity and IT disaster recovery solution, which enables businesses to prepare themselves to respond efficiently in the face of disruption.
Archer Business Resiliency Features:
- Centralized management console from which admins can track recovery plans and strategies, perform risk assessments, document BCDR plans, and report crisis events
- Workflows for standardizing and automating BCDR processes
- Detailed reporting into the current status of disaster recovery plans, including risk assessment, test results, and—in the event of a live disaster—remediation status
- Visual dashboards offer accessible, at-a-glance insights into key metrics such as risk summaries and business impact analysis
Expert Insights’ Comments: Archer’s Business Resiliency platform is particularly strong in terms of reporting; once a BCDR plan or workflow is created, businesses can easily monitor the status of those plans, including their criticality and their business impact ratings for compliance, finance, data integrity and confidentiality, reputation, and strategy. This makes Archer Business Resiliency a strong solution for larger organizations that need to create multiple BCDR workflows to align with different business areas or compliance frameworks, to help them prioritize their disaster recovery processes. It must be noted, however, that Archer’s solution does not include native data backup and recovery.
Arcserve offers a range of data protection, storage, and recovery solutions to help businesses minimize data loss and downtime in the event of a disaster. Arcserve Continuous Availability is their continuous data protection and application availability platform, designed to keep businesses fully operational in the event of a disruption. The solution offers continuous data protection for Windows and Linux applications and systems, and is compatible with on-premises, remote, and cloud-based systems, ensuring that businesses can secure all of their data, no matter where it resides.
Arcserve Continuous Availability Features:
- Continuous, real-time replication of data at the file system level (individual files, databases, and applications) and replication of full physical and virtual machines
- Replications are written out to secure physical servers, VMWare, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure environments
- Application rollback enables businesses to restore apps to a point in time before the disruption
- Data in transfer between local and remote locations is secured with AES 128-bit, AES 256-bit, or custom-level encryption
Expert Insights’ Comments: Arcserve Continuous Availability’s main strength lies in its promise of zero downtime; the platform continuously replicates data at a byte-level from your local systems within a secure replica system, ensuring that backups are always up to date. This means that businesses won’t lose any data during a disaster and can continue to operate with minimal downtime. Arcserve’s platform is a strong solution for mid-size to larger enterprises looking for data replication and recovery for a diverse environment. This will help prove compliance with data protection standards as well as provide business continuity during data loss events such as ransomware attacks.
Fusion Risk Management is a software provider that enables businesses to evaluate their operational resilience through risk management, business continuity management, and incident management. Built on the Salesforce Lightning Platform, their flagship Fusion Framework System delivers risk analysis and continuity planning capabilities to help businesses equip themselves to recover efficiently and effectively from any cyber incident.
Fusion Framework System Features:
- Continuity planning capabilities enable IT teams to plan their disaster response based on dependency so they can adapt to changing situations, rather than following a static plan
- Exercise management helps businesses test and evaluate their incident response processes
- Risk assessments provide business impact analysis to help prioritize incident response
- Dependency mapping visualizes dependencies and gaps across the organization, while impact tolerance analysis highlights how much risk and impact your business can withstand
- Intuitive interface with mobile access
Expert Insights’ Comments: The Fusion Framework System is a robust tool for business continuity planning, enabling business to efficiently build incident response plans based on up-to-date risk and impact analysis. The platform’s biggest strengths are its intuitive interface and report visualization features, which make it easier for organizations to identify (and remediate) dependency gaps and high-risk areas of their environment. We recommend Fusion’s BCDR tool for mid-sized to larger enterprises looking for a way to build a highly customizable business continuity plan, based on in-depth risk analysis.
LogicManager is a leading provider of enterprise risk management software that focuses on centralizing risk management processes and automating them so IT teams can spend less time identifying risks, and more time remediating them. LogicManager Business Continuity Management (BCM) is their BCDR solution that helps businesses prepare for disruptions so they can resume normal operations quickly and efficiently.
LogicManager Business Continuity Management (BCM) Features:
- Centralized console for managing, reviewing, and updating BCDR information, with customizable reports and compliance checklists
- Intuitive “to-do” lists make it easier to track the progress of business continuity plans in the event of a disaster
- Pre-built business impact analysis templates enable businesses to identify their most critical processes and focus recovery steps on those areas
- Automatic, nightly Call Tree updates via integrations with HRIS applications mean IT teams needn’t manually update their contact list
- Automatic business continuity plan (BCP) testing ensures that BCPs are operational and working effectively
Expert Insights’ Comments: While LogicManager BCM doesn’t offer native backup and recovery features, it does aid disaster recovery by enabling IT teams to track the progress of their BCPs as the incident unfolds. We recommend LogicManager’s solution for mid-sized organizations looking for a way to centrally create, test, and monitor the progress of their BCPs. Additionally, thanks to the platform’s highly customizable reporting functionality, LogicManager BCM is also suitable for businesses that need to prove BCP compliance to auditors and data protection regulators.
Premier Continuum is a BCM provider that pairs business continuity and disaster recovery software with training and consultancy to help organizations increase their IT resilience. ParaSolution is Premier Continuum’s flagship BCDR software. Designed to centralize, standardize, and automate all stages of the business continuity lifecycle, from initial risk assessment to live recovery tracking during- and post-incident.
Premier Continuum ParaSolution Features:
- Web-based software that’s compatible with Windows, MacOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and iOS devices
- Integrated business impact analysis, risk assessment, business continuity plan development, and incident management
- Highly customizable reporting functionality with the option to build new reporting dashboards to quickly assess top priorities
- IT disaster recovery module enables businesses to run DR workflows to test their effectiveness, identify dependency gaps, and track their live recovery progress
Expert Insights’ Comments: As well as their BCDR software, Premier Continuum offers consultancy to support businesses as they increase their BCM maturity level, and organizational training that’s available in person, live online, and via webinars, documentation, and videos. This makes ParaSolution suitable for organizations at any stage of BCDR maturity, and particularly those who may benefit from added human support when creating business continuity plans. Within those parameters we recommend the solution to mid-sized and large enterprises, as some of the more granular customizations can be complex to set up.
Riskonnect is a provider of integrated risk management software that makes it easier for organizations to manage risk and compliance across all their digital systems. Riskonnect Business Continuity & Resilience (formerly Castellan) is their BCM software, designed to help businesses prepare for IT disasters so they can reduce disruption to their operations.
Riskonnect Business Continuity & Resilience Features:
- Central management console provides access to risk scorecards and reports that highlight performance and risk indicators
- Digital models of the organization illustrate dependencies, vulnerabilities, and critical systems
- Business impact analysis conducted within the digital model makes it easier for IT teams to identify weaknesses in their response and recovery processes
- Mobile-friendly emergency notification tools and encrypted chat enable response teams to communicate effectively and securely
- Response plan tracking
- Pre-built workflows and templates based on BCDR best practices
- Out-of-the-box alignment with ISO 22301
Expert Insights’ Comments: Riskonnect Business Continuity & Resilience is particularly strong in its visualization of risk across the organization. The platform enables IT teams to create a map of their entire virtual environment and run tests within that digital model to identify their most critical assets and vulnerabilities, as well as any gaps within their BCDR plan. We recommend Riskonnect Business Continuity & Resilience for larger enterprises looking to develop a business continuity plan based on granular risk and impact analysis.
SAI360 is an integrated risk management solution that combines software and training content to help businesses streamline their risk management workflows, improve security, and prove compliance. The platform combines Environmental Social Governance (ESG), Environmental, Health, Safety and Sustainability (EHS&S), Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), risk management, internal audit, regulatory compliance, cybersecurity, and learning modules, and is trusted by over one million users—including 1/3 of the Fortune 500—in over 50 countries.
SAI360 Business Continuity Management Features:
- Business impact analysis based on proprietary algorithms, and with custom reporting, enables teams to identify key vulnerabilities and dependency gaps
- Central BCDR plan repository where admins can create, upload, update, and distribute plans
- Automatic activation of crisis and recovery plans based on which assets have been affected
- Integration with emergency mass notification systems such as OnSolve and EverBridge allows IT teams to notify one another, as well as key stakeholders, on the status of the incident and the recovery process
- Localized date format and multi-lingual label and screen content enable businesses to deploy the solution in multiple offices around the world
- Intuitive, mobile-responsive interface with comprehensive management dashboards that visualize the status of the BCDR program for security, executive buy-in, and compliance
- Life Safety training, drills, and exercises help train all users on how to respond immediately to an incident
Expert Insights’ Comments: SAI360 is a comprehensive risk management platform that delivers robust business continuity management capabilities. We recommend SAI360 as a strong BCDR solution for mid-market organizations and larger enterprises—particularly those with incident response teams based in different offices around the globe that rely on effective communication.
Veritas is a market-leading data management provider. Their cloud-based data protection, virtualization, digital compliance, and visibility products are trusted by over 80,000 organizations worldwide. Backup Exec is Veritas’ data backup and recovery solution designed for small- to mid-sized businesses. The platform enables IT and security teams to easily create and maintain an archive of data backups, then recover lost data in the event of a disaster—whether accidental or malicious.
Veritas Backup Exec Features:
- Central management console from which admins can schedule backups and monitor the status of backups, replication, and recovery
- Deduplication to reduce storage costs and minimize bandwidth strain
- Disaster Recover-as-a-Service (via the “Instant Recovery Cloud”) provides instant physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-physical data recovery
- Incremental backups of virtual machines for instant VM recovery
- GDPR Guard ensures backups are GDPR compliant
- Cloud deployment with full Microsoft 365, Google Cloud, Google Workspace, and Salesforce integrations
- Compatible with VMWare, Windows, and Linux environments
- Two-factor authentication secures access to backups, and all disk-based copies are secured against encryption, deletion, or modification from external sources
Expert Insights’ Comments: Veritas Backup Exec is a user-friendly and cost-effective, yet comprehensive backup and recovery solution for organizations looking to securely replicate their data for easier recovery in the event of a data loss disaster. While this platform doesn’t offer business continuity planning or risk assessment, it’s a strong solution for SMBs looking to improve their disaster recovery processes.
Acquired in 2021 by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Zerto is a cloud data management and protection provider. Zerto offers data protection, backup, recovery, and workload mobility solutions for public cloud and on-prem virtual environments. Founded on continuous data protection (CDP), Zerto’s eponymous platform uses journal-based technology to ensure business can recover accurate, untampered copies of their data in the event of a disaster, rolling back to any point in time to mitigate the impact of the incident.
Zerto Features:
- Journal-based technology enables point-in-time recovery that minimizes data loss to just seconds
- Restoration options range from full system recoveries to granular file recovery
- Flexible storage options allow users to write out backups to their own data center or a public, private or hybrid cloud
- Straightforward set up and configuration with the help of the Zerto Replication wizard
- From the Zerto Virtual Manager, admins can access recovery information and analytics, and schedule backups—including creating different rules for different services
- Mobile app allows admins to monitor backups remotely without having to connect through a VPN
- Access to backups even when the original system is experiencing downtime
Expert Insights’ Comments: Zerto offers a comprehensive backup and recovery platform that enables businesses to securely replicate their data and easily restore it to minimize downtime in the event of a disaster. Users can access data via backups even when the original versions are disrupted, enabling continuity throughout the recovery process—which, in itself, takes relatively little time. We recommend Zerto’s solution for larger enterprises looking for an all-in-one data protection and disaster recovery solution.
FAQs
What Is BCDR?
With business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) software, businesses can prepare themselves to face disruptions so they can resume normal business operations as quickly as possible. BCDR software ensures that businesses have a plan—or multiple plans—in place to get back on their feet after an incident such as a cyberattack, natural disaster, or hardware failure.
How Does BCDR Work?
BCDR combines two key processes: business continuity management and disaster recovery.
Business continuity management (BCM) software enables business to create business continuity plans (BCPs) and then monitor the effectiveness of those plans through regular testing. This helps to streamline incident response processes so that responsibilities can be delegated effectively, stakeholders can be notified quickly, and the overall time to respond is reduced. It also ensures that businesses have a clear audit trail should they need to prove that they took all the necessary steps to secure their data and their users in the event of a disruption.
BCM software often includes business impact analysis, risk assessments, “to-do” lists, automated tasks and response workflows, BCP testing, and reporting on BCP status.
Backup and disaster recovery software creates point-in-time copies of files, databases, and even entire systems, then writes those copies out to a secondary storage facility. This enables IT teams to quickly restore lost data in the event of a cyberattack, natural disaster, or accidental deletion.
Backup and recovery software may offer features such as automated backup creation, deduplication, backup archive security (such as encryption and multi-factor authentication), archive search functionality, and granular restoration options.
Some BCDR software offers full backup and recovery functionality; other solutions focus mainly on BCM, while offering some disaster recovery features such as live incident response tracking, secure communication tools, and mass notification and alerting.
Who Is BCDR For?
The simple answer is that all organizations should be prepared to deal with potential disasters, so that they can get back on their feet as quickly as possible should the worst happen. However, not all businesses will need all the features offered by a BCDR solution; smaller organizations, for example, may not have as many systems to manage, so may not need to set up such complex workflows as offered by business continuity management software. They may, however, still want to invest in a backup and disaster recovery tool to help them restore their data in the event of a disaster.
Larger enterprises, on the other hand, may have lots of disparate systems to manage, and they may need to set up multiple recovery workflows that are set in motion according to which systems are impacted by the disaster. Depending on their business needs, larger enterprises may look for separate business continuity management and disaster recovery solutions in order to benefit from specific features, or they may look for a solution that offers both feature sets in one for ease of management.
