Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Solutions for Retail Companies Series

In a time of uncertainty and rise of risks, companies are facing an extended range of challenges expanding through the growth of their digital footprint and type of technologies used to ensure their operational excellence, business agility and sustained innovation: other than cyber threats such as ransomware attacks, the external risk of a region-scaled failure which can be caused from natural causes (flood, fires, earthquakes and etc.) jeopardizing the entire datacenter cannot be neglected. Apart from disasters, unavailability of a company IT environment can halt all internal and external operations, which can be seen as dramatic for companies in terms of financial and reputational losses. Therefore, to fully prepare for the risks, establishing a mature Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) program is critical for companies across all industries.

Comparing to other industries, retail companies usually have a broader business scope, which even may involve products' entire lifecycle: from the production, provisioning, inventory management, order reception and fulfillment, the processes can generate massive amount of data. Moreover, to expand the user base, the retail industry players have decentralized their e-commerce activities on several different platforms instead of narrowing down their online offering to one specific channel, which can result in a complex architecture between their internal business system and other external e-commerce companies' systems. With the raising complexity of business processes and the exponential increase in data volume, it is crucial for retail companies to formulate appropriate BC/DR strategies in a timely manner to ensure the availability and integrity of the operating environment in the event of a disaster.

From our past experience of serving retail companies and helping clients to build BC/DR capabilities, we will introduce our methodology in BC/DR strategy selection and solution implementation through the series of articles "Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Solutions for Retail Companies". This article will focus on DR location strategy selection, and how retail companies should determine the most appropriate deployment plan based on their IT characteristics and business needs.

2022

• Solution Implementation
  This article continues to introduce the methodologies adopted while providing BC/DR services and share how we carry out the programs step-by-step, in order to help our clients not only establish a BC/DR solution but continuously optimize the capabilities to maintain an advanced and industry-leading position.
  
• Strategy Selection
  This article focuses on DR location strategy selection, and how retail companies should determine the most appropriate deployment plan based on their IT characteristics and business needs.