You Have a Business Continuity Plan. Could Anyone Actually Use It?

Something goes wrong. Ransomware. A flood. A data centre failure. Someone says "pull up the business continuity plan."

And then reality hits.

It's a PDF from three years ago. It references staff who have left. The contact list is wrong. Recovery priorities were never validated with the business. Nobody has ever actually walked through it.

The plan exists. It just doesn't work.

We see this across municipalities constantly. The plan was written, probably well intentioned, maybe even thorough at the time. Then it went into a spreadsheet or a SharePoint folder, and life moved on.

That's not a people problem. It's a format problem.

Spreadsheets don't remind you when a contact has changed. PDFs don't flag that your RTOs haven't been reviewed in 18 months. Word documents can't show leadership a dashboard of organizational readiness. None of them connect your application catalog to your critical business services so you can see the ripple effects when a system goes down.

When your BCP lives in static documents, updating it is painful enough that people avoid it. And a plan that can't be easily maintained won't be maintained.

The municipalities we work with that have strong, usable continuity programs have moved past documents and into structured platforms that keep plans alive.

That's why we built encasedIT in partnership with WG Advisory. It's a management platform purpose built for municipal IT leaders, and business continuity is one of its core modules.

In practice, that means business services are mapped to the applications and systems that support them, so you can see exactly what's at risk when something goes down. RTOs are calculated using validated frameworks, with business units owning the inputs rather than IT guessing on their behalf. Plans stay current through micro updates that take departments two to three hours a year instead of a painful annual overhaul. Leadership gets real visibility through dashboards and scorecards rather than a verbal assurance that "we have a plan." Cybersecurity, disaster recovery, and business continuity are connected in one place, with NIST 2.0 aligned assessments built in.

And because it's cloud based and runs in a browser, your plan is accessible during the exact kind of disruption it's supposed to address. Not locked in a file on a server that just went down.

Here's a quick pressure test for where you stand today.

• Pick your top five critical services and confirm the RTOs with the department heads who deliver them. Not the ones IT set three years ago.

• Check your contact tree and make sure every person listed is still in that role.

• Ask three department heads what they'd do first if core systems went down tomorrow. If they don't know, that's your answer. And check when each department's plan was last updated. More than 12 months? It's out of date.

If those questions make you uncomfortable, you're not alone. When we polled municipal leaders at a recent webinar and majority said they didn't have an up to date, active BCP.

The window to prepare is before you need to. Static documents got us here. They won't get us where we need to be.

If you want to see how encasedIT works or talk through where your organization stands on business continuity, reach out. We're happy to have the conversation.