Business continuity & disaster recovery basics

Business continuity is about keeping your business running through a serious disruption; disaster recovery is the specific part about getting your IT and data back. People use the terms loosely, but the distinction is useful: continuity is the whole picture (people, premises, suppliers, comms), recovery is the technical engine room. Most small businesses need a sensible handle on both.

Start with what can't be down for long

You don't need a 100-page plan. Start by listing what your business simply can't function without — email, your phone system, a key application, customer records — and how long you could realistically survive without each. That ranking tells you where to focus, instead of trying to protect everything equally.

Backups are the foundation — if they're tested

A backup you've never restored is a hope, not a plan. The two questions that matter: how much work would you lose (how recent is the last good copy?), and how long to get running again (how fast can you actually restore?). Backups should be secure, off-site, and the kind that survive a ransomware attack rather than getting encrypted alongside everything else.

Write down the order and the timings

When something goes wrong, panic is the enemy. A simple recovery plan — what comes back first, who does what, roughly how long each step takes — turns a crisis into a process you follow. It doesn't have to be elaborate; it has to exist and be known before you need it.

Plan for the everyday, not just the dramatic

Fires and floods make the headlines, but the disruptions that actually hit are more mundane: a failed server, a dropped internet line, a ransomware email. Things like 4G failover (so an outage doesn't stop your phones and payments) cover the common cases. The point is to be ready for the likely, not just the catastrophic.