Strategies for Managing Business Continuity During IT Failures

It’s hard to imagine getting through a workday without the right tools and services at your disposal. Whether you’re trying to manage your business finances, keep track of client requests, or process new orders, IT systems are what keep your business moving forward.

When all these systems work, you rarely consider how or why. But when something goes wrong, that’s all you’ll think about until the issues are fixed.

Broken software or compromised systems due to a cybersecurity incident can quickly bring your operations to a standstill. Even worse, if you don’t have the right recovery strategies in place before these situations happen, it can lead to extensive downtime for the business, negatively impacting the bottom line and even damaging relationships with customers.

Understanding Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

As you pursue efforts to help keep your business running smoothly in the face of unexpected disasters, you’ll likely come across terms like “business continuity” or “disaster recovery” used interchangeably. While they are closely related, they’re vital to your business in different ways.

Business continuity is all about the big picture in your organization. This represents different plans you have in place to “keep the lights on” when something significant is impacting your normal operations. This often covers a wide range of considerations, like how you’ll communicate with your team during IT incidents, how you’ll manage your suppliers, and how you’ll keep serving your customers even if your main office or systems are offline.

Disaster recovery is a much more technical part of this process. This involves the specific steps your recovery teams need to take when trying to get your business technology up and running after a disruption. This can include fixing compromised networks, restoring lost data, and migrating your services to a stable environment so you can get back to work as quickly as possible.

Identifying Critical Functions and Dependencies

Not every part of your business needs the same level of protection. Because of this, one of your first steps should be to organize a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). The BIA is a formal way to determine which parts of your business are the most vital to its success and where you should prioritize  your time and resources  when addressing larger issues.

A good BIA should help you answer three main issues:

• System Mapping: Which digital tools are vital to accomplish daily tasks?
• Loss Projection: How much revenue or growth potential do you lose every hour those tasks are stuck?
• Recovery Windows: How long can you stay offline before the damage to your company becomes permanent?

It’s important to look at this process realistically. For example, if you’re running a healthcare facility,  the equipment that keeps patients healthy and stable needs to be operational 24 hours a day. On the other hand, a system you use to track employee vacation days can probably stay down for a few days without causing an organizational crisis. 

By identifying and ranking these priorities accurately, you’ll be able to focus your budget on the things that keep your business up and running.

Setting Recovery Time and Data Goals

Once you know which systems are the most essential, you want to set some specific goals for getting them back online. You can do this by looking at two key metrics: RTO and RPO.

Your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) answers one of the simple questions, “How long can you afford to be offline?” This represents a timer that starts the moment a system fails. You should know exactly when that downtime moves from an “annoyance” to a “serious and costly issue.”

Your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is focused  on data loss. It helps you decide how much data your business can afford to lose. This is the gap between your last backup and the moment the crash happened. Depending on your business, you might be okay losing a few hours of business activity. Other businesses might need backups that happen every minute to keep your records as accurate as possible.

Strengthening Infrastructure Reliability

The reliability of your business infrastructure depends on the number of safety nets you have in place. For example, when a main system or database experiences a problem, you want your setup to automatically switch over to a backup so the business doesn’t skip a beat.

One of the most effective ways to do this is by following the 3-2-1 rule for your data. Keep three different copies of your backups. You then store them on two different types of technology, and keep at least one copy in a completely different physical location.

Following this simple logic ensures that if the office experiences a natural disaster or a local server fails, you still have other copies ready to go to keep your business running.

Managing Internal and External Messaging

Even if your IT team is trained well, your recovery efforts can still fall apart if nobody knows what’s going on. To keep things from getting chaotic during an IT crisis, your recovery plans should include a clear way to communicate with your team and customers.

Everyone in your company needs to know what happened, how long things might be down, and what they should be doing in the meantime. You also want to make sure your customers feel informed so they don’t lose trust in your brand reliability.

The best way to handle this is to draft your response templates ahead of time. This way, you aren’t trying to write a professional email or a social media update while you’re also dealing with a technical emergency.

Measuring Recovery Readiness

A plan on paper doesn’t do much for you unless you know it actually works. You want your team to be experts on their roles long before an actual emergency happens.

The only way to get there is through regular testing. You should run everything from simple “what-if” meetings to full-scale penetration tests where you work with outside services to run simulated attacks against your systems and networks. 

Testing throughout the year keeps your teams sharp and can help you prioritize how and where to invest additional resources as needed. These efforts can also be essential to ensure your business regularly meets compliance requirements.

Adhering to Regulatory Requirements

Depending on your industry, you might have legal requirements for how you handle your data and your recovery plans. Keeping your strategy in line with these rules is a big part of your long-term success.

Whether you’re following general guidelines like NIST or specific frameworks like HITRUST, you should keep very detailed records of your plans and your tests. Staying “audit-ready” at all times makes things much easier when it’s time for an official review. It also shows your stakeholders that you take your responsibilities seriously.

Focus on Long-Term Business Resilience Planning

You can’t always prevent technical issues in your business, but you can prevent them from becoming disasters. 
By making data recovery a core part of your business strategy, you’re doing more than just protecting your systems – you’re also protecting the reputation you’ve worked hard to build and the trust your clients place in you.