If your office is unavailable: keeping the business running

Backups protect your data. A continuity plan protects your ability to work when the office itself is the problem: a power cut, a burst pipe, a fire next door, a break-in or an order to stay away. For a small business the plan does not need to be a thick document. It needs a few decisions made in advance.

Where would people work?

If your email, files and main systems are in Microsoft 365 or another cloud service, most of your team can work from home or anywhere with internet, on a laptop or even a phone, within an hour of the office becoming unavailable. If some of your systems live only on a server or a computer in the office, those are the gaps to plan around. Our article Working from home securely covers the practical side.

How would people reach each other and your customers?

Teams and mobile phones usually cover internal contact. For customers, think about your main phone number: if it rings a desk phone in the office, can it be forwarded to a mobile or answered through an app? If you use a cloud phone system, that is a setting we can change in minutes; if not, your phone provider can usually divert the number. A short notice on the website and a changed voicemail greeting cover the rest.

What do you need that is only in the office?

Walk through a normal day and note what is physical: a server, a label printer, the card terminal, the key safe, paper files, the only laptop with the accounting software. For each, decide whether it needs a cloud alternative, a spare kept elsewhere, or simply a plan to live without it for a few days.

Who decides, and who calls whom?

Agree who decides that the office is closed and how staff are told, with a list of personal mobile numbers kept outside the office, for example in a shared OneDrive folder the managers can reach from their phones. Include us, your landlord, your insurer and your key suppliers on the list.

Power and internet

An uninterruptible power supply keeps network equipment and a server running through a short outage and shuts them down cleanly in a long one; see Power protection: surge protectors and UPS. For internet, a phone hotspot or a backup connection from a different provider covers most short outages.

Writing it down

For managed clients we keep the technical side of this in your handover documents: what runs where, how to reach it from outside, and how to restore it. The business side, who decides and who is called, is yours to write, and a single page is enough. We are happy to go through it with you; email hello@bitlogix.tech.