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Disaster Recovery for Contractors: Business Continuity Beyond Backups

Backups restore data, but a business needs people, process and a place to work. Here is how contractors can plan to keep operating through a major outage.

3 min readBy Ironfield Cyber Team

Having a backup is not the same as being able to keep working. When a fire, flood, ransomware attack or extended outage takes out your office systems, backups answer only one question: can we get the data back? The business also needs to know who is in charge, how people will communicate, where they will work and how the bills and payroll will keep moving.

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning cover these questions. Contractors may feel that their work is on jobsites, not in the office, but the office produces the pay applications, payroll and purchasing that keep the jobsites supplied.

Two Different Ideas

  • Disaster recovery focuses on restoring technology: systems, data and connectivity.
  • Business continuity focuses on keeping the organization operating, including people, processes, facilities and communications, even while systems are down.

You need both, and the business side should drive the technology side, not the other way around.

Step 1: Identify What Must Keep Running

List your critical business functions and rank them. Typical ones for a contractor include:

  1. Paying employees.
  2. Paying critical suppliers and subcontractors.
  3. Billing customers and collecting payments.
  4. Communicating with field crews, owners and suppliers.
  5. Accessing drawings, schedules and project documents.
  6. Estimating and bidding.
  7. Safety and compliance records.

For each, decide how long you could tolerate an interruption, and what the minimum acceptable operation looks like.

Step 2: Map Dependencies

For each function, identify the systems, data, people, vendors and facilities it relies on. Payroll may rely on a cloud service, a bank portal, a person with approval authority and a stable internet connection. Mapping reveals single points of failure, such as one employee who knows the process or a single internet line into the office.

Step 3: Decide Recovery Targets

Set two targets for each critical system:

  • Recovery time objective: how quickly you need it back.
  • Recovery point objective: how much recent data you can afford to lose.

Be honest about cost. Shorter targets require more investment. Match them to real business impact rather than aiming for the shortest everywhere.

Step 4: Plan Alternate Ways of Working

  • Communications: an out-of-band method, such as a group messaging service on personal phones, plus a phone tree and printed contact lists.
  • Workspace: a plan for staff to work from home or another location, with secure access to company systems.
  • Manual procedures: a way to run payroll, approve payments and record time if systems are unavailable, along with strong controls so fraudsters cannot exploit the disruption.
  • Documents: offline or cloud copies of key drawings and contracts for active projects.
  • Connectivity: a backup internet connection, such as cellular, for the office.
  • Power: surge protection and, where justified, backup power for essential equipment.

Step 5: Assign Roles

Name an incident leader and a backup, plus owners for communications, technology, finance and field operations. Include contact details and decision authority. Everyone should know who is in charge, especially after hours.

Step 6: Prepare Vendors and Contracts

Know who you will call: your IT provider, internet carrier, insurance carrier, counsel and key software vendors. Confirm your agreements cover emergency support and understand response times. Keep copies of insurance policies and contacts in a place that does not depend on your own systems.

Step 7: Write It Down and Print It

A concise plan, often 10 to 20 pages including contact lists, is more useful than a long document that nobody reads. Store copies in multiple places, including printed copies and a cloud location outside your main environment.

Step 8: Test and Update

Run a tabletop exercise at least annually. Walk through scenarios such as ransomware, a building fire and a long internet outage. Note gaps, assign fixes and update the plan. Do a technical test, such as restoring a critical system, on a regular schedule.

Common Pitfalls

  • Treating the plan as an IT project instead of a company-wide one.
  • Never updating it as systems and staff change.
  • Assuming cloud services will always be available.
  • Forgetting the human side, such as communication and decision-making.

Next Step

Ironfield Cyber helps contractors and energy companies build practical continuity plans, from identifying critical functions to testing recovery. If you have backups but no plan for operating through an outage, we can help you close that gap.

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