Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

Business continuity is the plan for keeping your business running when something goes wrong. Disaster recovery is the technical plan for restoring systems after a failure. Together, they are the difference between a disruption and a catastrophe.

The Jamaica context

Jamaica faces hurricanes, earthquakes, power outages, and connectivity disruptions. Any business continuity plan that does not account for these is incomplete. The plan must address:

• Hurricane season — June to November, with peak in August-September
• Power reliability — outages are common, especially outside Kingston
• Connectivity — fiber cuts and ISP outages happen
• Flooding — can block roads and prevent staff from reaching the office

Step 1: Business impact analysis

Identify your critical business processes and the systems that support them. For each, define:

• RTO (Recovery Time Objective) — how long can the process be down before it causes unacceptable damage?
• RPO (Recovery Point Objective) — how much data can you afford to lose?

These two numbers drive every technical decision that follows.

Step 2: Risk assessment

List the threats that could disrupt each critical process. For each threat, estimate likelihood and impact. Prioritize your investments against the highest-risk combinations.

Step 3: Technical recovery strategy

Design the technical architecture that meets your RTO and RPO:

• Backups — frequency, location, and test recovery
• Redundancy — redundant power, connectivity, and servers
• Failover — automatic or manual, and to where
• Cloud — can critical systems failover to cloud infrastructure?

Step 4: Communication plan

During a disruption, communication is critical. Define: - Who declares an incident? - How are employees notified? - How are customers notified? - Who speaks to the media?

Step 5: Test the plan

An untested plan is a hypothesis. Run a tabletop exercise at least annually — a simulated scenario where the team walks through the plan and identifies gaps. Run a technical failover test at least twice a year.

The cost of not planning

Businesses without a continuity plan that suffer a major disruption typically never recover. The cost of planning is always less than the cost of not planning.

Next steps

If you need a business continuity plan, request a consultation. We assess your risks, define your RTO and RPO, and build a plan that fits your business.