Is Your Business Continuity Plan Still Accurate?
Most plans are outdated within six months. This guide walks you through a structured mid-year review, covering contacts, RTOs, technology recovery, and testing, in a single afternoon.
Business continuity plans are written to match the organization at a specific point in time, but personnel change, vendors shift, and technology gets replaced. When a real disruption hits, the gaps between what’s documented and what’s actually true become expensive problems.
The halfway point of the year is a natural moment to run a check — not a full overhaul, just a structured review to confirm your plan still reflects how you operate.
What the Guide Covers
This guide focuses on the five areas most likely to drift between formal plan reviews:
Contact lists and roles Outdated contact information is one of the most common (and most avoidable) plan failures. Learn what to verify and how to do it in under an hour.
Recovery time and recovery point objectives If your business has grown or added services since your RTOs were last set, your targets may no longer reflect actual tolerance. The guide walks you through a quick recalibration check.
Technology and data recovery New systems, retired systems, cloud migrations, and untested backups all create gaps. This section covers what to audit and how often.
Facilities and alternate work locations Physical recovery assumptions change, lease terms end, access procedures get updated. This section confirms your workspace recovery options are still viable.
Plan testing and training A plan that hasn’t been tested is a plan with unknown gaps. This section reviews what good testing looks like and what to do with the results.
Includes a Printable Review Checklist
Every section includes a Yes / No / N/A checklist you can work through with your team. A “No” on any item is a gap needing an owner and a deadline.
Why Mid-Year Reviews Matter
According to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 (Ponemon Institute), organizations that contained breaches in under 200 days faced average costs of $3.87M, compared to $5.01M for those that took longer. Your recovery procedures directly affect that timeline.
Plans that go untested also fail when they’re needed most. Reviewing your plan now, before storm season peaks or an incident forces the issue, is the lower-cost option.
Built for Operations, Risk, and Compliance Teams
This guide is written for the people responsible for keeping a BC plan current: operations managers, risk and compliance leads, IT directors, and business continuity coordinators. It’s practical, not theoretical, and structured around what you actually need to check, not a textbook overview of what business continuity is.
Last reviewed: June 2026
Your Questions About Planning, Testing, and Recovery
Business continuity planning sounds straightforward until a real disruption hits, and suddenly the gaps are obvious. Whether you’re building a plan from scratch, pressure-testing one you already have, or trying to understand what recovery looks like in practice, these are the questions we hear most. Here’s what you need to know.
Why do so many business continuity plans fail when they’re needed?
Usually, it comes down to overconfidence. Businesses assume a fiber cut will be repaired in a few hours, or that a multi-day power outage simply won’t happen to them. They’ve been in the same location for 20 years without a major incident, so they stop asking “what if.” That assumption is exactly what gets them. The unprecedented events — the once-in-75-year ice storm, the wildfire, the hurricane hitting a city that hasn’t seen one in decades — are the ones that expose the gaps in a plan that was never really tested.
Test with Agility
Agility Recovery offers several testing options to fit your organization's needs.
How do I know if my area’s risk profile has changed?
Think about what’s changed in your region over the last several years. Has your state seen significant population growth, particularly since the pandemic? More development means more strain on utilities and infrastructure. The level of resiliency your grid or network had five or 10 years ago may not be what it is today. When was the last major disruption in your area, and what’s different now? Those are the questions worth asking before assuming your environment is as stable as it once was.
What’s the difference between remote testing and in-person testing?
It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. If you need to verify employee knowledge or satisfy a compliance requirement, a virtual tabletop exercise can be a highly efficient option that takes two hours, causes minimal disruption, and is easy to coordinate across teams. But if your concern is technical — failover capabilities, network routing, server restoration, security infrastructure — you need to get off-site and stress test your systems in a real recovery environment. Virtual testing can tell you what your people know, but it can’t tell you whether your technology actually works when your primary facility is unavailable.
How far in advance should we schedule a test?
Schedule tests at least a year out. If you run an annual test, book the following year’s date before you leave the current one, even if it’s tentative. The goal is to get a date on the calendar that your organization, your recovery partner, and any third-party vendors or MSPs can all plan around.
What can a dedicated recovery facility offer that we can’t replicate ourselves?
A fully equipped off-site facility gives you the ability to truly separate from your primary environment, which is the only way to know whether your technology and your team can function without it. That means workstations, servers, high-speed fiber, redundant power and climate control, secure access, document handling equipment, and colocation space for servers. For back-office functions like loan originators, operations staff, or anyone who works at a desk, it’s a ready-made environment that requires no setup. For regulated industries, auditors respond very favorably to documented off-site testing. It’s one thing to say you have a recovery plan; it’s another to show you’ve executed it outside your own walls.
What happens when a business declares a disaster?
You call your recovery provider and speak with a recovery manager. From there, it’s a full discovery conversation: what are you experiencing, what has happened to your business, what do you need? Once a recovery plan is confirmed and approved, the team executes: assets are dispatched, workstations are prepared, and connectivity is established. The speed of all of that depends almost entirely on the preparation that happened before the call. Businesses that have tested regularly know exactly where they want equipment delivered, how they want it staged, and who the contacts are. The recovery is seamless. Businesses that haven’t tested are making those decisions in real time, under pressure, which is the worst possible time to be making them.
How do we think about recovery beyond just our own operations?
Especially for organizations that serve communities directly like financial institutions, healthcare, and the public sector, recovery isn’t just about getting your own employees back to work. It’s about the people on the other side of your business who depend on you. When a bank goes down, the customers who need access to their accounts are affected too. That broader lens shapes how recovery teams prioritize and how urgently they work. Getting a business back up and running at two in the morning is a commitment to the community that business serves.
Where do we start if we haven’t tested in a while (or ever)?
Start by setting a date. Pick a cadence — annual, quarterly, whatever fits your organization — and commit to it. Then assess what kind of test makes sense: knowledge check, tabletop, or full technical failover. If you have technology dependencies that are critical to your operations, plan to test those off-site at least once. And involve your vendors early: your MSP, your core systems providers, anyone whose systems need to be part of the test. The sooner they’re on the calendar, the smoother the test will be.
Ready to test your plan?
Whether you’re starting with a virtual tabletop or ready to run a full off-site failover, Agility Recovery has the team, the tools, and the facilities to make it happen. Contact us to schedule your test or learn more about what “recovery ready” really looks like./
When a disaster hits your business, your brain does something counterproductive: it generates a list.
Call the generator company. Call the IT vendor. Find someone who can get temporary workspace set up. Figure out who handles logistics. Track down the contact for that equipment rental company you used three years ago.
Every minute spent working through that list is a minute you’re not recovering.
The Hidden Cost of a Fragmented Response
Most businesses don’t realize how fragmented their recovery approach is until they’re in the middle of a crisis. That’s when the coordination overhead becomes visible: multiple vendors with different response times, different priorities, and no shared view of your situation. Someone has the generators. Someone else has the fuel. A third party is handling communications. Nobody’s talking to each other, and you’re the one trying to hold it all together while also running your business.
The result is slower, more expensive, and more stressful recovery with more exposure to the gaps that fall between vendors.
What a Single Point of Contact Actually Delivers
Orestes Meeks, a resilience specialist at Agility Recovery, describes what customers are really asking for: “I need to be able to pick up the phone. I need to have a team of specialists who can engage with me — everything from logistics to asset management to installation to recovery.”
When one team manages all of that together, they’re working from the same playbook. They know what’s been deployed, what’s en route, and what still needs to happen. They can pre-position resources before a storm hits because they have the full picture. And the conversations that matter — Are you ready? Should we pre-deploy? What do you need on the ground? — can happen before the crisis, not during it.
There’s also an element of expertise that’s easy to underestimate. Many businesses, Meeks notes, get led “through areas they haven’t considered” — scenarios and vulnerabilities they simply hadn’t thought through until a specialist walked them through it during a call or a tabletop test. That kind of proactive guidance is hard to get when your resilience strategy is spread across a half-dozen vendors.
A Model Built Around When You Actually Need It
There’s a financial dimension worth addressing directly. Many businesses assume that consolidating their resilience strategy means carrying heavy ongoing costs. A membership-based model changes that math considerably — as Meeks puts it, “the membership fee’s pretty low compared to what recovery costs normally are.” You’re maintaining readiness for a manageable fee, with the full weight of recovery resources available the moment you need them.
The One Call That Sets Everything in Motion
The businesses that recover best prepared the right way: with a partner who already knows their operations, has already thought through their vulnerabilities, and can pick up the phone at any hour and immediately start moving resources.
“When you call us, we respond quickly,” Meeks says. “We’re on 24/7, 365 days a year.” One call. Full recovery. That’s what resilience looks like when everything’s already in place.
One partner. One call. Full recovery.
See how Agility Recovery brings everything together — logistics, power, workspace, communications — so you’re never working through a list when it matters most.
Every business has a disaster recovery plan. Most of them sit in a binder on a shelf — carefully organized, thoroughly reviewed, and completely useless at 3 AM when the roof is leaking, the power is out, and your on-call manager is trying to find the right phone number in the dark.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about disasters: They don’t schedule themselves around your availability.
Ice storms don’t wait for Monday morning. Tornadoes don’t check your calendar. Heat domes don’t care that it’s a holiday weekend. As Orestes Meeks, a resilience specialist at Agility Recovery, puts it: “Most of the things that happen don’t happen during business hours. They happen at times when nobody’s there.”
And when something goes wrong — really wrong — the gap between having a plan and having someone answer the phone right now can mean the difference between a manageable disruption and a catastrophic one.
The Problem with Planning for Everything
For decades, business continuity looked like a documentation exercise. Build the binder. Cover every scenario. Update it annually. Check the box.
The problem is that the world doesn’t stay still long enough for that approach to work. The threats businesses face today — extreme weather events, supply chain disruptions, infrastructure failures — are more frequent, more varied, and more unpredictable than they were even five years ago.
A static plan built for yesterday’s risks won’t protect you from tomorrow’s realities. What businesses actually need is a team that’s already thought through what you haven’t — and is ready to move the moment you call.
What Instantaneous Recovery Actually Looks Like
When a disruption hits, you shouldn’t be making six calls to six different vendors. Customers today are asking for something different: “instantaneous recoveries,” as Meeks describes it — everything from logistics to asset management to installation to recovery, coordinated by specialists who’ve handled situations like yours before.
That’s what 24/7/365 availability means in practice. Not a voicemail. Not an after-hours email. A real person asking, “How can I help you? What’s happening on the ground? Are you ready for recovery? Should we pre-deploy?” — and then doing it.
Resilience Is a Relationship
The businesses that recover fastest aren’t necessarily the ones with the most detailed plans. They’re the ones with the right partner already in place before anything goes wrong: someone who knows their operations, their vulnerabilities, and how to mobilize resources at a moment’s notice.
Because when the 3 AM call comes, the last thing you want to be doing is figuring out who to call.
Disaster Recovery Made Simple
Talk to one of our experts to find out how Agility can support your team, no matter where they are.
Most businesses have a recovery plan. Few have a recovery partner. Hear from Agility Recovery’s Dennis Behrman and Orestes Meeks on why the old binder-on-a-shelf approach is obsolete — and what businesses actually need when disaster strikes.
What real resilience looks like: one call, 24/7 support, and everything you need to get back up and running before the damage adds up.
A business continuity plan (BCP) allows companies to prevent and recover from threats that affect day-to-day business operations, including natural disasters, cyberattacks, fires, floods, and pandemics.
A BCP should be developed before a disaster occurs and should include input from all stakeholders. The goal is to protect assets and ensure that operations continue during and after a crisis. A BCP should:
- – Identify all risks, including how the risks will affect operations
- – Implement procedures and safeguards that will lessen the risks
- – Test to ensure the process works well
- – Review the process to make sure it is current
Accomplished business owners understand the importance of ensuring their companies’ enduring triumph by navigating challenges head-on. Despite a business’s secure location, unforeseen circumstances remain a potential hazard. Is your organization primed to tackle emergencies efficiently and recover quickly?
Watch our on-demand webinar where we delve into strategies for effectively preparing for and managing disasters. This includes seamlessly incorporating risk assessment and business impact analysis (BIA) into your business continuity plan, testing and preparation for possible scenarios across all work sites, and tips to quickly restore mission-critical operations in the aftermath of a catastrophe.
Testing your business continuity plan allows you and your workforce to exercise how to approach an incident and find gaps in the plan to address where it needs improvement. Even though a developed business continuity plan provides your organization with the tools to predict, drafting a plan is only half the battle. Businesses face myriad threats , from a rodent infestation to a planned renovation. A developed business continuity plan provides your organization with the tools to predict, prevent, and respond to risk efficiently. The strategy ensures that the organization and its clients will remain operational with minimal to no downtime or threat to operations. However, drafting a plan is half the battle. What’s most important is ensuring your business continuity strategy is sound, useful, and practical. This is where testing your plan comes into play. Testing business continuity allows you and your workforce to exercise how to approach an emergency and find gaps in the plan to address where it needs improvement.
Types of Business Continuity Tests
Plan Review
A plan review is much like an audit of the BCP. The BCP team and the C-level management or department heads get together to review the plan and decide if any components are missing or need revision. This type of test is beneficial for training new members of the BCP team or in regular onboarding. Among other aspects reviewed during a meeting are contact information, the validity of recovery contracts, and coverage of applicable business continuity and disaster recovery scenarios. A plan review may also include training new managers on plan details so they can pass that knowledge down to their teams.
Tabletop Test
This is a more involved way of reviewing and testing a BCP. Employees participate in an actual exercise during a tabletop—a scenario-based, role-playing exercise. Everyone involved practices their roles and responsibilities during an emergency, such as an earthquake, hurricane, or active shooter.
Walk-Though/Simulation Test
A BCP simulation test is a more hands-on type of tabletop exercise. While a tabletop test, as the name suggests, typically consists of discussing plan details around a table, a simulation test combines real recovery actions. It can be data loss and restoring backups, live testing of redundant systems, network outage, physical recovery, emergency notification, and other relevant processes. In addition to critical personnel, all employees would be involved in this BCP event testing process.
Frequency of Business Continuity Plan Testing
The frequency of testing your BCP depends on your company. We recommend evaluating each of your emergency preparedness plans, such as business continuity, disaster recovery, incident response, and other plans, during a year. Testing would typically include an annual tabletop exercise or a walk-through test of all individual EPP plans, including testing various scenarios for threats that are a high risk to your organization. Make sure to continually test those scenarios of higher priority to your organization. Many factors can help you determine how often your organization needs to test its EPP plans.
- – Employee count changes
- – Changes in clients/vendors or their contact information
- – Department changes
- – Employee job function updates
- – Structural changes to the building
The size, location, and how often your company goes through changes are typically the most significant factors in determining how often you should test your BCP. Enterprise companies and employees who experience regular turnover should be updating and testing their BCPs twice a year. For small to mid-sized organizations, it is recommended to do a run-through test once a year to make sure that the plan is still effective and all staff is refreshed on what to do in the event of an emergency.
Involving Vendors in Your BC Testing
In the course of your testing process, whether you’re doing a plan review, tabletop test, or simulation test, you need to make sure your critical vendor partners are included in your testing. Verifying that your vendors are prepared for the unexpected and have a contingency plan is essential, as it allows for greater accuracy and usability of your strategy. It also allows your vendors to provide feedback that may be valuable to your plans or testing process.
Document the Testing Process
Finally, it’s necessary to document the results of any testing conducted, along with any actionable findings from those tests. Doing so will help your workforce learn what can and should be improved and visualize progress that’s been made. Following up on these items and consolidating recommendations from tests is the most crucial process in the BCP testing lifecycle. Testing, registering your testing results, and executing methods to improve your BCP is the most reliable way to strengthen your organization’s response processes.
In a fast-paced and unpredictable world, business interruptions are inevitable. Whether it’s a cyberattack, natural disaster, or supply chain disruption, how fast your business recovers plays a significant role in its long-term success.
Unfortunately, many businesses fall into common traps that delay recovery after business interruptions. Delays are costly in many ways, and often exacerbate the impact of the disruption, which leads to unnecessary and preventable losses. However, you can avoid these common recovery pitfalls by understanding what they are and how you can avoid them, ensuring your business operations can bounce back as swiftly as possible after an interruption. Here are seven common – and costly– mistakes that can delay your recovery from a business interruption, along with practical tips on how to avoid each one. By being proactive now, you can minimize your downtime when the unexpected happens.
1. Failing to Update Your Recovery Plan Regularly
Recovery plans are not static documents – they should evolve alongside your business. As you introduce new technologies, a change in process or operations, or you face significant personnel turnover, your recovery plan must be updated to reflect these changes. An outdated plan can lead to significant delays in your recovery efforts because employees will follow procedures that are no longer relevant or effective. Solution : Regularly review and update your recovery plan, ideally at least every six months or after any significant organizational change. Regular business continuity testing is a great way to keep your recovery plan current and ensure all employees are aware of the latest procedures.
2. Inadequate Employee Training
Even the most comprehensive recovery plan will likely fail if your employees are not properly trained to execute it. Lack of training can lead to hesitation, errors, and inefficient recovery processes. When your business is in the middle of a crisis, every minute counts, and unprepared employees can inadvertently cause delays that make the situation worse. Solution: Conduct regular training sessions and simulations to ensure all employees understand their roles during a recovery. A great time to conduct these training sessions is every six months – right after you’ve updated your recovery plan. Business continuity testing and tabletop exercises provide a risk-free environment for teams to practice their recovery steps under various scenarios, allowing them to become more comfortable in their role should disaster strike.
3. Not Establishing Recovery Equipment Needs and Specs in Advance
Many businesses fall victim to the mistake of waiting until after a crisis hits before figuring out what equipment they need to restore critical systems. Waiting until after the crisis is simply too late, and it can result in further delays and additional costs while the business tries to source equipment or configure the necessary tools. If the specifications of the required equipment – laptops, servers, power systems, etc. – aren’t documented in advance, it can significantly slow down the recovery time. Solution: Don’t wait for the crisis to hit. Document the specifications and quantities of equipment you’ll need to restore critical systems before a business interruption occurs. This can include anything from IT infrastructure to power solutions. When new members onboard with Agility, our team of recovery managers help identify exactly what you will require to maintain operations – from generator sizes to technology requirements. This documentation allows your recovery partner to ensure what you need sourced and available on standby in the event of an interruption.
4. Lack of Assured Backup Power & Connection Services
When a business interruption happens, especially when it's due to a natural disaster or infrastructure failure, the absence of assured backup power or reliable internet connectivity can extend the time it takes for your business to recover. Without these backup systems in place, businesses are likely to experience major operational disruptions and severe financial losses. Solution : Your business can maintain operational continuity – and greatly reduce financial losses – by having backup power and connectivity services in place before a business interruption occurs. This will prevent sourcing delays as local equipment providers are overwhelmed by requests and will also protect you from disaster-time cost inflation, not to mention save you hours on the phone as you call around and compete with other businesses for limited resources.
5. Insufficient Data Backup & Recovery Strategies
Losing data can be a catastrophic event for a business, but fortunately is something that is entirely preventable. Many businesses lack a robust data backup and recovery plan – if they even have one at all. This loss of data from a business interruption event can lead to irreparable damage to a business. Solution: Implement a reliable data backup and recovery strategy that ensures critical information is backed up regularly and can be restored in moments. Learn more .
6. Poor Communication During a Crisis
In the midst of a crisis, misinformation can spread quickly and can lead to confusion or faulty decision-making and further delays in your recovery efforts. It can also stem from having an outdated recovery plan or lack of training, which further reinforces the importance of having a holistic, well-planned, and well-trained strategy in place for recovery after a business interruption. Solution : Develop a crisis communication plan that includes predefined channels and protocols for all communication. Have a plan that allows all key stakeholders, such as employees, customers, partners, and vendors, to be kept informed as needed throughout the recovery process. Conduct tabletop exercises to ensure your team understands chain of communication protocols and that contact records are updated frequently.
7. Neglecting Vendor & Partner Preparedness
Most businesses don’t operate in a complete vacuum; they are also dependent on vendors and partners. If your partners and vendors aren’t prepared to adequately respond to a business interruption, their delays can have a significant impact on your own recovery time and ability to continue your business operations. It could be a key supplier who can’t deliver materials on time, or a service provider who is offline. All these business relationships and dependencies can affect each other, particularly in the recovery process. Solution: Work with your vendors and partners to ensure all parties have business continuity plans in place, with each knowing they can rely on the other to be back up and running as soon as possible. For more information, download our Supply Chain Resilience Checklist and ensure your operations are prepared for business interruptions.
Take Action
Avoiding these common mistakes can significantly improve your business’ ability to recover from a multitude of business interruptions swiftly and efficiently. With proper planning, training, and resources, you can minimize the impact of disruptions and keep your operations running smoothly. Agility Recovery offers a wide range of solutions that support businesses along each step of the recovery path – reach out today to learn more .
As we step into September 2024, it’s time to recognize National Preparedness Month—an initiative that underscores the importance of being prepared for any disaster, whether natural or man-made. Established by FEMA, this month-long observance encourages individuals, communities, and businesses to take proactive steps to ensure resilience and safety in the face of unexpected events.
For businesses, preparedness isn’t just about having a plan—it’s about embracing a holistic approach that aligns with the five national preparedness goals: Prevention, Protection, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery.
- Prevention: Businesses can minimize risks by identifying potential threats early on and implementing measures to avoid incidents before they occur. This involves everything from cybersecurity protocols to health and safety regulations.
- Protection: Safeguarding your business’s assets, employees, and data is crucial. Establishing physical and digital security measures ensures that your operations remain intact even when external threats arise.
- Mitigation: By analyzing potential impacts and taking steps to reduce the severity of an incident, businesses can lessen damage and operational disruptions. This might include investing in backup power solutions, strengthening supply chains, or conducting regular risk assessments.
- Response: When disaster strikes, having a robust response plan ensures that your business can act swiftly and effectively. This involves clear communication strategies, predefined roles, and ready-to-deploy resources to minimize downtime.
- Recovery: Post-incident, the focus shifts to getting back to normal operations. A solid recovery plan includes steps for rebuilding, restoring critical functions, and learning from the event to enhance future preparedness.
This National Preparedness Month, take the time to assess and strengthen your business’s continuity strategies. By aligning with these five goals, your business will be better equipped to face challenges head-on and emerge stronger than ever. Remember, preparedness isn’t just a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing commitment to resilience and success.