Business Continuity
Business continuity planning for small teams
Keeping the work going while the systems are down, and knowing in advance which parts of the business can wait and which cannot.
What business continuity covers
Business continuity is the wider question that disaster recovery sits inside. Recovery is about restoring systems; continuity is about the business continuing to operate while that happens — which functions must keep running, what the manual fallback is, who communicates with customers, and how long each function can be interrupted before the cost stops being technical. For most small teams the useful output is short: a list of functions in priority order, the systems each depends on, and a tested way to bring those systems back. EnterProtect covers the last of those through BCDR and file backup, and the archive below shows what the first two look like when they are missing.
Where to start
The products that cover this.
BCDR
Recovery points and the procedure that turns them into working systems.
File Backup
The servers and endpoints the priority functions depend on.
Read next
Incidents and background from our archive.
Auckland Transport ransomware outage
A public service running manually while its systems were down.
Americold cold storage outage
A breach whose consequences were physical and time-limited.
Cellcom voice and text outage
Days without the service customers actually bought.
Common questions
Do small businesses need a continuity plan?
The plan can be short. What matters is that the priority order exists before the incident, because deciding which function comes back first is a business judgement and a bad time to make it is while customers are calling. A single page listing functions, their dependencies and their tolerable downtime is usually enough to start.
Where does business continuity end and disaster recovery begin?
Continuity is the business question: what keeps operating and how. Disaster recovery is the technical half: which systems return, in what order, from what copies. Continuity decides the priorities; recovery executes against them.
What is the first step?
List the functions the business cannot go a day without, and the systems each one needs. That list drives everything else, including what is worth protecting most closely.
See it against your own environment
Bring a real scenario to the walkthrough. You keep the evidence it produces.