Business Continuity Planning
Most business continuity plans I review were written once, for a disaster that isn't the one most likely to hit a modern business. They cover a flood or a fire and gloss over what happens when ransomware takes down your file servers, your backups turn out to be partially encrypted too, and you have to decide in real time whether to pay, rebuild, or both, while customers and employees are asking what's going on.
Business continuity, done well, is the answer to one practical question: if the systems you depend on go down, what keeps the business running, and for how long can you tolerate each piece being out? That's different for every organization. A professional services firm might survive a week without its CRM if phones and email still work. A logistics company might lose contracts within hours if its dispatch system is down. The plan has to be built around your actual dependencies, not a generic checklist.
How I build these
I start with a business impact analysis, figuring out what functions actually matter, how long each can be down before it causes real damage, and what you need to keep them running at a reduced level. From there the plan gets specific: who makes the call to invoke it, what the communication plan looks like for staff, customers, and partners, how backups get validated and restored, and what a manual fallback looks like for the processes that can't just wait for IT.
I build these to be used, not filed. That means short, actionable runbooks for the people who'll actually execute them, not a hundred-page document that sits in a shared drive. And I push to test the plan, at least on paper through a tabletop, because a continuity plan that's never been exercised is really just a hypothesis.
Who needs this
If you don't have a documented recovery time objective for your critical systems, if your "backup plan" is really just "we have backups" without a tested restoration process, or if a client or insurer is asking for a continuity plan you don't currently have, it's worth building one properly.
Get in touch and let's map out what actually needs to keep running when something goes wrong.