Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

It’s easy to imagine any number of disasters that could create a catastrophic data‑loss scenario—from hardware failure and ransomware to accidental deletion or a site-wide outage. In today’s always‑on environment, it’s not a matter of if – but when. With employees unable to access data and maintain productivity, every second that passes is lost revenue, missed opportunities, and potential damage to your reputation.

Understanding the Difference Between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Disaster Recovery (DR) is your structured process for restoring business functionality and regaining access to data after such an incident. This includes recovering servers, applications, and critical files from backup so that systems can return to an operational state. It is a critically important part of your overall security and data protection strategy that should be carefully planned, tested, and documented in advance, with clear roles, procedures, and communication paths.

However, even with a strong DR plan, a full restoration often takes both time and resources. Restoring large data sets, rebuilding servers, and validating application integrity can introduce hours—or even days—of downtime, depending on your recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). This means that traditional DR alone does not necessarily provide business continuity, because users may still be unable to work while those recovery processes are underway.

Business Continuity is your ability to keep business operations running at an acceptable level at all times, even while a disaster is unfolding and recovery activities are still in progress. It focuses on maintaining access to the applications, data, and communication tools your teams rely on every day, so that customer-facing services, internal workflows, and compliance-related processes can continue with minimal disruption. Supporting technologies often play a critical role during this window, while Disaster Recovery processes work to meet your recovery time (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).

These can include online file services, cloud-hosted applications, virtualization platforms, and image-based backups that can be mounted or booted as virtual machines to keep users working while systems are being fully restored. Centralized management and monitoring help IT quickly redirect users to temporary systems, enforce security policies, and verify that critical workloads remain available.

When implemented correctly, Business Continuity ensures that employees can continue to access the tools and data they need, customers experience little to no interruption, and your organization preserves both revenue and reputation while the underlying infrastructure is being rebuilt in the background.

Enhancing Business Continuity with VHDX

Imagine your application server suffers a critical hardware failure, leaving employees in a lurch. Fortunately, you have a DR plan in place, and data is in the process of being restored to a new server. But employees need not wait around discussing it by the water cooler, because a Virtual Machine duplicate of the Server was quickly booted and made available to ensure an uninterrupted workflow. In fact, most employees were blissfully unaware that any disruption ever took place. 

Many small businesses might feel they don’t have the resources for a comprehensive Business Continuity solution, but this isn't true. Often, adding resources to improve continuity can be done with minimal investment. In fact, some virtualization capabilities may already be included in your backup software. In the case of NovaBACKUP, a VHDX System Image (Hyper-V Virtual Hard Disk) backup is easily created and booted as a virtual machine in just a few simple steps. Admins can rely on the fact that business continues and mission-critical processes are supported, even while their Disaster Recovery images are rebuilding.

Taking redundancy even further, disaster recovery (and virtual machine images) is best copied and hosted offsite to guard against local disasters. The Buffalo WSS TeraStation is one affordable example of a network storage device that can quickly add numerous enhancements to your BCDR (business continuity disaster recovery) plan.

Advantages of NovaBACKUP software on a NAS Device

Using NovaBACKUP software on a Buffalo NAS device supports BCDR with many advantages, including:

Added Security: Easily back up virtual machine images to a remote location for fast access during emergency scenarios. Even replicate to other locations for redundancy and to isolate system images from local effects.

Flexibility: Windows server products like this can incorporate any supported cloud product you’re using. Should your business strategy change, you can choose a different cloud provider or even incorporate NovaBACKUP cloud services.

Efficiency: Rather than using different solutions for local backup, image backup, and cloud backup, NovaBACKUP software on Buffalo storage devices provides an all-in-one hybrid solution that can accomplish all of this with VHDX / virtualization functionality for added business continuity considerations.

Guaranteed Access: Not every traditional Disaster Recovery process is a success. Virtualization technology eliminates numerous hardware dependencies so that the business moves forward regardless of the disaster recovery status.

Reduced Cost: Virtual machines are recoverable via any hardware, further reducing the cost of server infrastructure for recovery. Buffalo devices support the "S" in SMB, without recurring costs and without requiring the use of any specific cloud.

Why Small Businesses Need a Plan

Every small business should have a disaster recovery strategy and plan in place. But an organization's ability to continue unhindered through a disaster incident shouldn’t hang upon the success of a Disaster Recovery restoration alone. 

Administrators need multiple technologies to turn to during a crisis, coordinated under a single, well‑thought‑out Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategy. This includes having both local and off-site copies of data, image‑based backups that can be booted as virtual machines, and secure cloud replicas that can be accessed even if the primary site is unavailable. At a cost-effective price point, a professional BCDR solution can be created that offers multiple types of backup (file, application, and image‑level), fast image restore, and flexible cloud options—all managed from a central console so that failover and recovery steps are clear, repeatable, and testable.

By combining these capabilities, you gain the ability to restore individual files, spin up entire systems as virtual machines, or recover to new hardware without being locked into a single path. This layered approach reduces downtime, mitigates risk from hardware failures and ransomware, and helps support regulatory requirements around data protection and continuity. Our teams are here to identify your exact requirements, recommend the right mix of local and cloud protection, and help you design a BCDR plan that fits both your technical environment and your budget.

Speak with a NovaBACKUP expert or a Buffalo storage team member today. Want to learn more? Watch a recent NovaBACKUP-Buffalo webinar below:

WEBINAR: How to Simplify Backup and Disaster Recovery BDR with NovaBACKUP and Buffalo Americas