Most businesses don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what happens when their technology stops working.
And really, that’s understandable. When everything is running the way it should, you have customers to take care of, employees to manage and a business to run.
The problem is that when something does happen, that’s usually the worst time to start figuring out what to do.
Whether it’s a cyber incident, an internet outage, a failed server or another unexpected disruption, having a plan can make the difference between an inconvenience and a much bigger interruption to your business.
An incident response plan doesn’t have to be a hundred-page document filled with technical terminology. It needs to answer some pretty basic questions:
Who do we call? Who makes decisions? What needs to come back online first? And how do we keep the business moving in the meantime?
Here are six things we believe every business should have in its plan.
1. Know Who Is Responsible for What
When something goes wrong, you don’t want five people trying to solve the same problem; or everyone assuming someone else is handling it.
Your plan should identify who is responsible for the different parts of the response.
Who contacts your IT provider? Who makes business decisions if systems need to be taken offline? Who communicates with employees? If customers need to be notified, who handles that?
These don’t necessarily need to be different people. In a smaller business, one or two people may wear several hats.
What matters is that everyone knows their role before there’s a problem.
2. Have Important Contact Information Somewhere You Can Actually Access It
This sounds simple, but think about where your important contact information lives today.
If it’s stored in your email and you can’t access email, what happens?
Your response plan should include current contact information for the people and organizations you may need during an incident, including your IT provider, key vendors, cyber insurance carrier, legal counsel and other important business partners. And don’t forget your own internal contacts!
Most importantly, make sure this information is available somewhere your leadership team can access even if your normal systems aren’t.
3. Decide How You’ll Communicate
We rely heavily on technology to communicate. Which becomes a problem when the technology we’re relying on is what’s unavailable.
If Microsoft 365 is down, can your team still communicate?
If your network is unavailable, how will employees know whether they should come into the office or work remotely?
If an outage affects your customers, who will communicate with them?
Your plan should include an alternate way for your team to communicate and some basic guidelines for when employees, customers and vendors should receive updates.
You don’t need to write every possible message ahead of time. You just need to know who is communicating, how they’re doing it and what information needs to be shared.
4. Know Which Systems Matter Most
If everything went offline tomorrow morning, what would you need back first?
That’s a question every business should be able to answer.
For one company, it might be access to its line-of-business application. For another, it could be email, customer records, accounting software or a shared file system.
Not every piece of technology has the same impact on your ability to operate.
Identifying your most important systems ahead of time helps your IT team prioritize recovery based on what your business actually needs—not simply which system is easiest to restore first.
This is also where technology planning becomes business planning. Your IT provider should understand how your business operates well enough to know which systems are truly critical and how long you can reasonably be without them.
5. Have a Recovery Plan – and Make Sure People Know It Exists
Once you’ve identified your priorities, the next question is: What actually happens when there’s a problem?
Your plan should outline the basic steps for responding to an incident, including:
- Who gets contacted first
- When an issue needs to be escalated
- Which systems are addressed first
- Who has the authority to make important decisions
- How employees will be kept informed
- How the business will operate while recovery is taking place
Your employees don’t need to know every technical step your IT provider will take. They do need to understand what is expected of them.
A good response plan removes as much guesswork as possible.
6. Test the Plan
This may be the most important part.
Having a plan and knowing the plan works are two different things.
The same is true for backups. Seeing that a backup completed successfully isn’t the same as knowing you can restore the information when you need it.
Plans need to be reviewed and tested.
People leave. Phone numbers change. Software gets replaced. Businesses move to new cloud services. New employees join the team. What was accurate two years ago may not be accurate today.
Periodically walk through your plan. Verify your contacts. Test your backups and recovery procedures. Talk through a few realistic scenarios with the people who would actually be involved.
You’d much rather find the missing piece during a test than during an actual outage.
Prepared Doesn’t Mean Nothing Will Ever Go Wrong
Good IT isn’t about promising that you’ll never have an outage, equipment failure or security issue. No one can realistically promise that.
It’s about making sure you’re in a much better position when something does happen.
That’s one of the biggest differences between simply fixing technology when it breaks and actually managing IT proactively.
When we work with a business, we want to understand more than its computers and servers. We want to know what the business depends on, what needs to be protected, what needs to be restored first and what the plan is when things don’t go as expected.
Because the best time to answer those questions is before you need the answers.
How prepared is your business?
If you’re not sure what would happen if an important system went down tomorrow, that’s a good place to start.
Hurricane Technologies can help you look at your current IT environment, identify gaps and build a practical plan around the way your business actually operates.
