Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BCDR) — Executive Guide
An executive briefing on building business resilience. Covers downtime cost, recovery objectives (RTO/RPO), and the gap between untested backups and a tested recovery plan.
What's inside
- Downtime costs UK SMEs £1,000–£10,000+ per hour
- Backups exist in most businesses but few are tested
- Tested recovery plans turn weeks of downtime into hours
- Resilience is now a commercial priority, not a technical concern
- Compliance alignment with GDPR, Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001
This executive guide is written for directors and leadership teams who are responsible for business continuity outcomes but are not directly responsible for IT operations.
It explains the commercial cost of downtime for a typical UK SME, the difference between RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective), and why most organisations have backups but few have a tested recovery plan.
We cover how to align continuity planning with GDPR, Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001 obligations, and what a credible recovery test looks like.