Business Continuity Planning

Keep Running When Things Go Wrong

Every business faces disruptions. Hardware fails. Ransomware hits. Facilities lose power. Key employees leave without documenting anything. The difference between a business that weathers these events and one that does not is almost always preparation. A business continuity plan is a practical document that tells your team exactly what to do when something goes wrong, who is responsible for each step, and how to get back to normal operations.

What We Cover

Risk and Impact Analysis We identify the threats most likely to disrupt your business and assess the impact of each scenario. Hardware failure, ransomware, power outage, facility loss, and key person dependency are all evaluated with your specific operation in mind.
Recovery Time Objectives We work with you to define how long your business can realistically tolerate being down for each critical system. These objectives drive every other decision in the plan. A business that cannot survive more than four hours of downtime needs a different plan than one that can tolerate a day.
Backup Strategy Review We review your current backup configuration against your recovery objectives. If there are gaps between what your backups can recover and what your business needs to recover, we identify them and recommend what needs to change.
Incident Response Procedures We document step-by-step procedures for the most likely incident scenarios. Each procedure assigns responsibility, defines decision points, and provides the specific information needed to execute recovery without needing to improvise under pressure.
Communication Planning Who do you contact when something goes wrong? In what order? What do you tell customers, employees, and vendors? A continuity plan that does not address communication leaves your team making these decisions in the middle of a crisis.
Testing and Validation A plan that has never been tested is a plan you cannot trust. We build a testing schedule into the plan and conduct tabletop exercises with your team so that when a real incident occurs, the procedures are already familiar.

What You Get

You receive a written business continuity plan that is practical, tested, and maintained. It is written so that the people who need to execute it can do so without needing to interpret it or call us for guidance during an incident. The plan includes:

  • A risk and business impact analysis for your specific operation
  • Defined recovery time and recovery point objectives for critical systems
  • Step-by-step incident response procedures for each covered scenario
  • Contact lists, vendor escalation paths, and communication templates
  • A backup and recovery verification checklist
  • A testing schedule and tabletop exercise guide

How It Works

Step 1: Risk and Operations Review

We start by understanding your business operations, your critical systems, your current backup posture, and the threats most relevant to your situation. We look at both technology risks and operational risks because a continuity plan that only addresses IT misses half of what can go wrong.

Step 2: Plan Development

We develop the plan based on what we learned. Recovery procedures are written for the specific systems and scenarios relevant to your business, not copied from a generic template. Contact lists, escalation paths, and communication language are drafted with your actual vendors and stakeholders in mind.

Step 3: Testing

We conduct a tabletop exercise with your key staff to walk through the plan against a realistic scenario. This surfaces gaps, clarifies responsibilities, and builds familiarity with the procedures before they are needed under real pressure. Findings from the exercise are used to refine the plan before it is finalized.

Step 4: Handoff and Maintenance

The finalized plan is delivered and reviewed with your team. We recommend a review cadence to keep it current as your business and technology change. A plan that is accurate today may be dangerously out of date in two years if it is never revisited. We can manage ongoing plan maintenance as part of a broader managed IT relationship.

Does your business have a plan for when things go wrong? Contact us and we will build one that actually works.

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