Many contractors believe that having backups means being protected. Backups are essential, but they are only one ingredient. After a ransomware attack, a fire, a flood, or a major outage, the real question is how quickly your business can function again: estimating, scheduling, payroll, billing, and field communication.
Disaster recovery planning answers that question before you are under pressure. It turns a pile of backup files into a sequence of actions that people can follow.
Backup versus recovery
A backup is a copy of data. Recovery is the whole process of restoring systems, reconnecting people, and resuming operations. Recovery depends on things backups alone do not provide.
- Hardware or cloud capacity to restore onto
- Network connectivity and identity services
- Software licenses and installation media
- Documentation and credentials
- People who know what to do and have the authority to do it
- A decided order of restoration
Without these, you may hold perfect data and still be down for days.
Decide what matters most
Not every system is equally urgent. Rank them by business impact.
- Communications: email, phones, and messaging, so you can coordinate and notify.
- Payroll and accounting: paying crews and vendors, and billing customers.
- Project systems: schedules, plans, and field reporting tools.
- Estimating and bid systems, especially during bid season.
- File storage and archives.
- Lower-priority systems that can wait.
Two ideas help set expectations. The recovery time objective is how long a system can be down before the impact becomes unacceptable. The recovery point objective is how much recent data you can afford to lose. Leadership and operations should agree on these numbers, not leave them to IT alone.
Build the plan on paper
A useful plan is short and specific. Include:
- Contact lists: leadership, IT, key vendors, insurer, bank, legal counsel, and law enforcement contacts, with alternate numbers
- Roles: who declares an incident, who communicates with staff and customers, who leads technical recovery
- System recovery order with step-by-step instructions and dependencies
- Credentials and keys stored securely and accessible offline
- Network and system diagrams
- Vendor support contacts and contract numbers
- Manual workarounds for critical processes
Store copies where you can reach them if your network is down, such as printed binders and secure offline storage.
Plan for the field
Contractors have a particular challenge: work continues on sites even when the office is down. Think through how crews will:
- Access plans and schedules if cloud systems are unreachable
- Communicate using phones and alternative channels
- Record time and daily reports temporarily
- Order materials and receive deliveries
Manual forms and simple workarounds can bridge a short outage if prepared in advance.
Cover more than cyberattacks
Disasters take many forms. Texas and surrounding states see severe storms, tornadoes, flooding, and extended power loss. Consider scenarios such as:
- Loss of the main office or a yard
- Extended power or internet outage
- Cloud service disruption
- Theft of equipment
- Loss of a key IT person
Your plan should be flexible enough to handle several of these without being rewritten.
Test it
A plan nobody has practiced is a hope. Schedule exercises.
- Tabletop exercises: talk through a scenario with leaders and walk through decisions.
- Technical restore tests: recover a system or dataset and time it.
- Communications drills: confirm that contact lists work and people know their roles.
Document what you learn, fix gaps, and update the plan. Repeat at least annually and after major changes.
Keep it current
Update the plan when you add systems, change vendors, or change staff. An outdated contact list or missing system can derail recovery.
Consider insurance and contracts
Review your cyber insurance requirements and your customer contracts. Some require specific notification steps or recovery capabilities. Knowing these in advance prevents surprises.
Where Ironfield Cyber fits
Ironfield Cyber helps contractors define recovery priorities, document plans, and run tabletop and restore exercises. If you have backups but no written recovery plan, we can help build the first version with you.