A plan for the day
it stops working.

Business continuity planning establishes what your organisation must keep doing during a disruption, how quickly each function has to be back, and what it takes to get there. It is for organisations that have a backup but have never tested whether they could actually resume trading.

Recovery time objective is how quickly a system must be back. Recovery point objective is how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time, so an RPO of four hours means accepting the loss of up to four hours of work. Both are business decisions rather than technical ones, and they drive what the recovery solution has to cost. Wanting fifteen minutes on both is possible and considerably more expensive than wanting a day.

Disaster recovery is about getting the technology back. Business continuity is about keeping the business trading while that happens, which includes people, premises, suppliers, and communication. A firm with perfect disaster recovery and no continuity plan restores its servers efficiently while nobody knows who is telling the customers.

At least annually, and after any significant change. Testing does not have to mean a full failover. A tabletop exercise, where the leadership team walks through a scenario against the written plan, costs a couple of hours and reliably finds the gaps: the out-of-date phone list, the process that depends on a system that is also down, the decision nobody is authorised to make.

How staff are contacted when email is unavailable, who speaks to customers and what they say, who is authorised to declare an incident and to spend money during one, where people work if the building is inaccessible, and which suppliers need to be told. In a genuine event the technical recovery is usually the part that runs most smoothly, because it is the part someone has thought about.

The plan should be proportionate, not absent. For a team of fifteen this is a short document and an afternoon of thinking, not a binder. Smaller organisations are often more exposed, not less, because functions rest on single individuals and there is less slack to absorb a disruption.

We quote after scoping rather than before. Anyone pricing this work without looking at your environment is guessing, and the guess is rarely in your favour. Scoping itself is quick, and we tell you what it costs before we start it.

A first conversation takes about half an hour and costs nothing. Scoping is usually a week or two of our time depending on the size of the environment, and we agree the delivery dates with you before anything is booked in.

Yes, and it is common. We are happy to work as an extra pair of hands under your internal team, or alongside an incumbent provider on a defined piece of work. We will set out in writing where the responsibilities split, so nothing falls between us.

No. This can be delivered as a standalone piece of work for an organisation we have never worked with before, or folded into a managed agreement if you already have one with us. Plenty of clients use us for one thing and keep everything else where it is.

Our team is based in Auckland and we attend sites across the wider region. Most of this work is delivered remotely, so we support organisations throughout New Zealand, and we will say up front where being on site genuinely matters.

Named people, not a queue. You get a lead who knows your environment and stays with it, which is the difference between explaining your business once and explaining it every time you make contact.

You keep the documentation regardless, and anything registered in your name stays in your name. Whether we stay involved is your call. Some clients take it in house from there, others move it onto an ongoing agreement with us. We would rather you left cleanly than stayed because leaving was difficult.