Business continuity planning answers one question: if your office, your systems, or your team suddenly became unavailable, how quickly could your business recover?
Business continuity planning (BCP) is the broader strategy for maintaining operations during and after a disruptive event. Disaster recovery (DR) is the specific technical plan for restoring IT systems after a failure. DR is a component of BCP. For small businesses, these two plans are often combined into a single document.
BCP scenarios for small businesses include ransomware or cyberattack (most common), fire or physical damage to office, severe weather or tornado damage (especially relevant in Texas Panhandle), internet or power outage, and key employee unavailability. Each scenario requires different responses, though many underlying preparations overlap.
A practical small business BCP includes a current inventory of critical systems and data, documented recovery procedures for each system, tested backup and restore procedures, an alternate work location or remote work capability, a communication plan for staff and customers during an incident, and defined recovery time objectives (RTOs) for each critical system.
An RTO defines how long you can afford to be without a specific system. For most small businesses: email and customer communication need to be restored within hours; core business applications within 1-2 days; and full infrastructure within 3-5 days. Knowing your RTOs drives decisions about backup infrastructure investment.
A BCP that has never been tested is a document, not a plan. Ellison IT recommends tabletop exercises twice per year — walking through a scenario like ransomware to verify your team knows what to do, followed by annual backup restore tests to confirm your data is actually recoverable.
Ellison IT helps Texas Panhandle small businesses document and test their business continuity plans — so the next disruption is a manageable event, not a catastrophe.
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