Business Continuity

Business continuity planning covers the whole organization — people, facilities, vendor relationships, communication plans — not just IT systems. Disaster recovery is the specific piece of that plan concerned with restoring technology; a complete continuity plan asks broader questions like where staff work from if a building is inaccessible, or how the business communicates with customers during an outage.

A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is usually the starting point: ranking which functions are actually critical and how much downtime each can tolerate before real harm occurs, rather than treating every system as equally urgent. That ranking is what determines what gets built, tested, and funded first.

A continuity plan's real value shows up in whether it's been tested, not whether it's been written. A tabletop exercise — walking through a specific disruption scenario as a team, before it happens — routinely surfaces gaps a document review alone never catches, which is why plans that are written once and never rehearsed tend to fail in exactly the moment they were meant to help.