Business continuity planning for El Paso businesses
Business continuity planning decides, before anything goes wrong, how an El Paso business keeps taking orders and answering the phone while its systems are being restored, and TechBit Solutions builds, equips and rehearses that plan with you.
What this covers
Business continuity planning is the work of deciding, before anything happens, how your business keeps running when part of it stops. TechBit Solutions builds that plan with you, puts the technical pieces in place, and tests it.
It covers outages, ransomware, hardware failure, a burst pipe, a long power cut, and losing access to the building.
Continuity is not the same as backup
Backup is about data. Continuity is about the business.
A company with perfect backups can still be closed for two weeks, because restoring forty machines takes time, the phone system is also down, nobody can process a card payment, and the person who knows the supplier passwords is on holiday. None of that is a backup problem.
Backup is covered on the backup and disaster recovery page. This page is about everything around it.
What is included
- A written plan naming who does what, in what order, with phone numbers that are current
- Recovery time and recovery point targets agreed with you, not assumed
- An inventory of which systems the business genuinely cannot run without, ranked
- Backup and replication configured to meet the targets you picked
- A route to keep phones answered when the office is unreachable
- Access to systems from somewhere other than the office
- A communication plan for staff, customers and suppliers
- A rehearsal, and a written note of what the rehearsal exposed
How long can you be down
Most owners have never been asked this directly, and the answer is usually shorter than they expect once they work through it.
A distributor that cannot ship for a day loses a day of revenue and some goodwill. A medical practice that cannot see records cancels clinics and has to phone every patient. A manufacturer whose line stops is paying a full shift to stand still.
Put a number on it and everything else becomes a cost comparison instead of a guess.
Testing the plan
We rehearse the plan on a normal working day, with the people who would actually have to run it.
- Restore a real system from backup and time it, rather than trusting the report
- Walk through the first two hours of an incident out loud, with the plan open
- Check that the phone numbers and out-of-hours contacts in the document still work
- Find out which single person is the only one who knows something, and fix that
Every rehearsal we have run has found something. That is the point of running them.
The problem it solves
The businesses that recover quickly are not the lucky ones. They are the ones who decided in advance what mattered most and made sure that part could be brought back first.
The ones that struggle are usually discovering their priorities during the incident, while customers are calling.
Getting started
The first session is a conversation, not a technical audit. We ask what the business cannot do without and for how long, and the plan is built backwards from your answers.
Continuity planning is part of managed IT services rather than a separate product, and the response commitment behind it is set out on the response times page.
Call TechBit Solutions at (915) 629-8888.
Questions we get asked
Is this not just backup?
Backup is one part of it. Backup answers whether your data still exists. Continuity answers whether you can keep taking orders, paying people and answering the phone while that data is being restored. Plenty of companies have excellent backups and still lose two weeks of trading.
How long should we be able to be down for?
That is your call, not ours, and it is the first question we ask. A clinic and a warehouse give completely different answers and both are right. Once you have picked a number we can build to it and tell you honestly what it costs.
What is an RTO and an RPO?
RTO is how long you can be down before it really hurts. RPO is how much recent work you can afford to lose. If your RPO is an hour, backups have to run at least hourly. Those two numbers drive nearly every other decision we make together, which is why we start there.
Do you test the plan or do we?
We do, with you in the room. A plan nobody has rehearsed is a document, not a plan, and the middle of a crisis is a terrible time to read one for the first time.
What if the whole building is unusable?
That is squarely part of what the plan covers: where your people work from, how they reach systems, which number your customers ring, and who tells them what is happening. For El Paso businesses that has meant everything from a fire to a water main, and it is exactly why this is not only an IT document.