The second quarter of 2025 is in full swing, with projects ramping up, client demands growing, and mid-year targets fast approaching, making it a particularly busy time for businesses. However, increased activity also brings greater risks: unexpected disruptions can have a larger impact. Whether it’s a cyberattack, hardware failure, or any other unforeseen event, these challenges can quickly derail your operations.
To maintain your IT’s strength against these threats, you need an effective business continuity plan (BCP). But how can you be sure it’s up to the task? This article highlights the importance of business continuity planning and offers actionable steps to evaluate your BCP’s effectiveness and strengthen it.
What is a business continuity plan?
A BCP outlines the steps, resources, and responsibilities needed to keep your business running and minimize downtime during an emergency. When properly prepared and tested, it helps your team act quickly and stay on track, no matter what disruption occurs.
Without a tested and up-to-date BCP, it’s impossible to predict how long a disruption might last. Extended disruptions can lead to even greater productivity loss, financial setbacks, and erosion of customer trust.
The Q2 business continuity checklist
Use these simple steps to evaluate your BCP and strengthen your IT resilience, ensuring you can handle disruptions and keep operations running smoothly.
Reassess critical business functions
Start by identifying the operations and systems that are essential for your business to run smoothly. Neglecting this step can result in wasted time and resources on less important areas. For example, a hospital’s patient data, which must be continuously available for accurate medical treatment and HIPAA compliance, is a much higher priority than cafeteria management.
In the case of your business IT, ask yourself:
- What system or component would cause the biggest disruption if it failed?
- Which teams or departments would be most affected by downtime?
- How reliant are operations on specific digital tools or platforms?
Review and test your backups
Data backups create copies of your systems and data that you can use to restore operations — but only if they actually work.
Take the time to review your current backup system. Confirm your data is stored safely, ideally in a secure location away from your main site or in the cloud, and test how quickly you can restore your data. If recovery takes too long, your backups aren’t doing their job properly.
You may also want to consider partnering with a disaster recovery provider. Such experts can set up real-time data duplication and failover systems to maintain operations when something goes wrong.
Reconfirm your incident response team
No matter how well designed your plan is or how comprehensive your data backups are, they won’t be effective if your team isn’t prepared to act. That’s why it’s important to assess your incident response team, the group responsible for organizing, managing, and carrying out your BCP.
Make sure to:
- Identify the person who will be tasked to lead the response and specify the team members they will contact during a disruption.
- Define the roles and responsibilities of each team member to prevent overlap or gaps.
- Update your team contact list with the latest information, including new contacts, departures, and replacements.
Update your communication plan
When a crisis strikes, confusion can quickly spread without timely and accurate information, leading to delays, panic, and frustration. Clear communication helps reduce uncertainty and maintain trust, and guarantees all members of the organization know what’s going on.
Verify that your communication strategy includes:
- Internal notifications for staff, keeping everyone informed and calm while the response team acts.
- External updates for customers, vendors, and stakeholders, addressing concerns and keeping them updated.
- Reliable communication channels such as email, SMS, or messaging apps to distribute notifications and help the response team coordinate.
Run drills
Practice makes perfect. Regularly scheduled simulations of disruptions allow you to test how well your BCP performs in action, short of an actual emergency. They provide an opportunity to identify areas where your response team and company excel, as well as areas needing improvement.
You don’t need to shut everything down for a full simulation. Even a short tabletop exercise can reveal issues and spark valuable conversations.
Business continuity isn’t a one-time task
Make reviewing your BCP a routine. If your company has undergone growth or significant restructuring, it’s time to assess how these changes have affected your BCP.
Need help designing your BCP and putting it into action? Talk to the experts at Liberty Center One to explore how cloud hosting and disaster recovery services can keep your business ready, resilient, and running. Contact us today.