Identify critical services
List the systems, data and people-facing processes whose loss creates meaningful operational impact.
IT resilience
Business continuity starts before an outage
Continuity planning connects operational priorities, dependencies, backups, access, fallback procedures and communication. It does not guarantee uptime or recovery performance; real targets must be defined and tested for the actual environment.
Map dependencies
Know which identity providers, networks, devices, vendors, cloud services and external APIs each critical process depends on.
Define recovery priorities
Agree the order in which services should return and the maximum acceptable disruption or data loss for each context instead of inventing universal targets.
Back up what matters
Backups need scope, protection, retention and a recovery owner. A backup that has never been restored is an assumption, not evidence.
Create manual fallbacks
Where practical, document how essential work can continue temporarily if a system, provider or network is unavailable.
Protect emergency access
Recovery credentials and privileged access should be controlled, available when needed and not depend on the same failed component.
Plan communications
Decide who needs internal, customer or supplier updates during disruption and who is authorized to send them.
Exercise & improve
Walk through realistic failure scenarios, record gaps and update the plan rather than assuming a document will work during a real outage.
Let’s work together
Need to reduce operational single points of failure?
Describe the systems that matter, existing backups, major dependencies and current recovery assumptions so the next practical improvements can be prioritized.