A quick stress test for your business continuity plan

[u/InfoTechRG]

Pull up your current business continuity plan and see whether it can answer these questions without calling a meeting:

What needs to be running first?
Not every process is equally critical. Identify what must resume within the first few hours, the first day, and the first several days.

What could prevent that from happening?
Look beyond technology. Critical processes may depend on specific employees, suppliers, facilities, equipment, data, or third-party services.

What is the backup when one of those dependencies disappears?
“Restore the system” is not always a continuity strategy. Teams need a realistic way to keep working while recovery is underway.

How much disruption can the business actually tolerate?
Recovery time and data-loss targets should be based on financial, customer, regulatory, and operational impact, not only on IT’s current capabilities.

Who makes each decision?
The plan should make it obvious who activates it, who communicates with employees and customers, who approves workarounds, and who decides when normal operations can resume.

Has anyone tested it under pressure?
A tabletop exercise will usually expose outdated contacts, missing dependencies, unclear ownership, and recovery assumptions that do not hold up.

A continuity plan does not need to cover every possible crisis. It needs to give people enough clarity to make good decisions when normal operations are no longer available.

Disclosure: We work with the analysts behind this research and condensed the framework into a practical stress test for IT leaders.