Guide
How to Keep Working When Systems Go Down
Decide now what matters most and how you will work without it. During an outage is too late.
Why it matters
Power, internet, email and key systems all fail eventually. Organizations that keep serving clients through an outage decided ahead of time what matters most and how to work without it. The plan does not need to be long. It needs to exist and be tested.
Step by step
- List your critical systems and how long you can be without each one.
- Write a workaround for each: paper forms, a phone tree, a backup internet connection.
- Decide who tells staff, clients and the board, and how often.
- Test a backup restore every quarter and record the result.
- Walk through one scenario as a team once a year.
Common mistakes
- A plan that lives only in one person's head
- Backups that have never been restored
- No printed contact list for when email is down
- Never walking through a scenario as a team
Free tools for this
Business Continuity Plan
Critical systems, workarounds and who gets notified when things go down.
Backup Restore Test Log
Prove your backups work with a quarterly restore test and a simple record.
Incident Response Plan
Who to call and what to do in the first hour of a cyber incident.
Questions people ask
What is a business continuity plan, and do we need one?
It is how you keep serving clients when systems, power or the building are down: what matters most, the workarounds, and who gets told what. Every organization that people depend on needs one. Start with the free template.
How often should we test our backups?
Test a restore at least every quarter and after any big change. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan.
Not sure where to start?
One conversation and a straight answer about where your organization stands. No cost, no commitment, no pitch.