Many contractors run from a single headquarters with a server closet, a main internet line, and dozens of people scattered across jobsites. Everyone in the field depends on that one location for email, files, drawings, accounting, and sometimes phones. If the office is lost, whether to fire, flood, a tornado, a power failure, or a ransomware attack, the whole company is affected at once.
Disaster recovery is the plan for getting back to work. It is related to backup, but broader: backup preserves data, while recovery gets people and systems operating again. Here is how to approach it when your business is one office and many sites.
Start With Business Impact
List the functions that must keep running and how long you could be without each:
- Payroll and time collection
- Accounts payable and payment approvals
- Project management and drawings access
- Estimating and bid submission
- Email and phones
- Equipment tracking and dispatch
- Safety documentation
For each, estimate how many hours or days of outage would cause serious harm. This gives you recovery time targets. Also decide how much recent data you could afford to lose; that is your recovery point target. Use judgment rather than guesses from a vendor.
Identify Single Points of Failure
Ask: what happens if each of these disappeared?
- The server room or closet. Is data stored only there?
- The office internet line. Do remote users or cloud services depend on it?
- The firewall or VPN device. Could crews connect without it?
- One key employee. Does only one person know the passwords or the configuration?
- One vendor. Does a single provider control your domain, email, and backups?
Reduce Dependence on the Office
Move critical services to the cloud where it makes sense
Email, shared files, and project management are commonly hosted already. If your accounting and file systems are still in the server closet, evaluate moving them or replicating them to a secure cloud location.
Use offsite replication
Keep copies of critical systems at a second location or in a cloud recovery environment. Some solutions can start a recovered copy of a server in the cloud within hours, giving you a temporary home while the office is repaired.
Provide an alternate way to work
Ensure laptops can sign in and work without the office network. Consider cellular hotspots as a backup connection, and know how to forward the main phone number to mobile phones.
Write a Simple Recovery Plan
Keep it short enough that people will use it. Include:
- Contacts. IT provider, insurance carrier, key vendors, utilities, and leadership, with numbers that do not depend on your own systems.
- Decision makers. Who declares an emergency and who communicates with staff.
- Priority order. The sequence in which systems are restored.
- Alternate locations. A trailer, a partner's office, or work-from-home options.
- Credentials and licenses. Stored securely and available offline, including to someone besides the IT lead.
- Communication plan. How you reach employees if email is down, such as a text group or phone tree.
Store copies in more than one place, including printed copies kept off site.
Include Physical and Equipment Details
Record serial numbers and configurations of key equipment. Document network diagrams, ISP account details, and domain registrar logins. After a fire or flood, these details are what allow an insurer to settle quickly and an IT provider to rebuild quickly.
Practice
A plan nobody has tested is an optimistic story. Once or twice a year, run a short exercise:
- Pretend the office is inaccessible. How would payroll run on Friday?
- Restore one important system from backup and time it.
- Have a project manager try to reach drawings using only a laptop and a hotspot.
Write down what went wrong and fix it.
Don't Forget Insurance and Contracts
Review business interruption and cyber coverage with your broker. Understand what triggers a claim, what documentation is needed, and any waiting periods. Check customer contracts for notification obligations after an outage or data incident.
Taking the Next Step
You do not need a large budget to improve resilience. You need clarity about what matters, a second copy somewhere else, and a plan people have read. Ironfield Cyber can help contractors map dependencies, set realistic recovery targets, and run a tabletop that turns assumptions into a working plan.