Business continuity · Canada
Service group: Managed ITBusiness continuity planning for the day your systems, office or people are unavailable
Backups protect data. Continuity planning decides what your business does next: which systems come back first, how long you can wait, who makes the calls, and how staff keep serving customers in the meantime.
At a glance
- Service
- Technology-focused business continuity planning, documentation and exercises delivered by Podium Catchers
- Best suited to
- Canadian organizations of roughly 5 to 200 employees that rely on IT to operate and have no written, tested continuity plan
- Core deliverables
- Business impact analysis, agreed recovery time and recovery point objectives, recovery runbooks, contact and decision trees, and a tabletop exercise (as scoped)
- How it differs from backup
- Backup and disaster recovery services copy and restore data; continuity planning defines priorities, targets, roles and workarounds for the whole business
- Not included by default
- Backup software or hardware, alternate office space, insurance, legal or regulatory advice, and implementation of new recovery infrastructure
- Pricing basis
- Fixed-scope planning project with optional annual review and exercise, confirmed in a written quotation; published figures are proposals pending approval
- How to start
- Book a consultation, or begin with a Backup and Recovery Assessment to understand your current recovery capability
What business continuity planning covers
Business continuity planning answers a simple question with uncomfortable detail: if a key system, your office or a key person became unavailable tomorrow, how would the business keep operating, and how quickly would it need to recover? Ransomware, a flooded server room, a long internet outage, a cloud provider incident or the sudden departure of the one person who knows the accounting system all test the same thing.
Our continuity work focuses on technology and the business processes that depend on it. We start with a business impact analysis to identify your critical activities and the systems behind them. With your leadership team, we agree how long each can be down (recovery time objective) and how much data you can afford to lose (recovery point objective). We then compare those targets with what your current backups and infrastructure can actually deliver, and document the gaps.
The result is a plan people can use under pressure: short runbooks for each scenario, a contact and decision tree, manual workarounds for critical tasks, and a schedule of exercises to prove the plan works. It complements backup and disaster recovery rather than replacing it.
Why continuity plans are usually missing or unusable
Backups mistaken for a plan
Backups exist, but nobody has decided what gets restored first, how long it takes, or what staff do while they wait.
Targets never agreed
Leadership assumes recovery takes hours; the actual backup design would take days. The mismatch is discovered during an incident.
A binder no one has opened
A long template document written years ago, stored on the very server it describes recovering, and never exercised.
Key-person dependency
Recovery depends on one employee or contractor who holds the passwords and the knowledge, and may be unavailable when it matters.
Key capabilities
Business impact analysis
Structured interviews with department leads to rank critical processes, map them to systems and vendors, and estimate the operational and financial impact of downtime.
RTO and RPO definition
Recovery time and recovery point objectives agreed per system with leadership, then tested against what current backups and infrastructure can realistically achieve.
Gap analysis and roadmap
A clear list of where capability falls short of targets, with options and estimated effort to close each gap or to accept the risk knowingly.
Recovery runbooks
Short, scenario-based procedures for ransomware, site loss, internet outage, cloud service disruption and key-person absence.
Communication and decision trees
Who declares an incident, who calls whom, how staff and customers are informed, and where the plan lives when your systems are down.
Tabletop exercises
Facilitated walk-throughs of a realistic scenario with your team, followed by a written list of lessons and plan updates.
What the engagement includes
The exact deliverables and number of sessions are set in your proposal.
Typically included
- Business impact analysis workshops with leadership and department leads
- System and dependency inventory for critical processes
- Agreed RTO and RPO targets per critical system
- Gap analysis comparing targets with current recovery capability
- Scenario runbooks, contact lists and decision trees
- One facilitated tabletop exercise with a written after-action report
- Offline and cloud copies of the plan stored outside your primary systems
Requires separate scope or quotation
- Purchase or deployment of backup, replication or failover infrastructure
- Alternate workspace, equipment stockpiles or relocation services
- Insurance, legal, regulatory or financial advice
- Full-scale live failover tests, quoted as separate projects
- Non-technology continuity topics such as supply chain or facilities, beyond noting dependencies
Systems the plan typically addresses
The plan is technology-neutral, but it must account for how your actual systems recover.
- Microsoft 365 services and their native retention versus third-party backup
- On-premises servers, NAS appliances and virtualization hosts
- Line-of-business applications, both hosted and on premises
- Internet circuits, firewalls and remote access paths
- Telephone and contact centre systems
- Identity systems such as Entra ID and Active Directory, including break-glass accounts
- Password vaults and administrative credential storage
Who should invest in continuity planning
Businesses that cannot stop
Clinics, accounting firms near deadlines, construction companies with active projects and distributors with daily shipments.
Organizations asked for a plan
Companies whose insurers, lenders, clients or boards have asked to see a documented and tested continuity plan.
Firms after a near miss
Teams that recently experienced an outage, ransomware scare or key staff departure and want to be ready next time.
What you gain
- Leadership agreement on recovery priorities before an incident, not during one
- Recovery targets that match what your systems can actually deliver
- A short, usable plan stored where you can reach it during an outage
- Less dependence on any single person’s knowledge
- Evidence of planning for insurers, clients and boards
- A team that has rehearsed its response
How a continuity engagement runs
Kick-off
We confirm scope, participants, critical locations and any existing plans or insurance requirements.
Business impact analysis
Workshops identify critical processes, systems, vendors and the impact of downtime over time.
Targets and gap analysis
RTO and RPO are agreed, current capability is assessed, and gaps are documented with options.
Plan and runbooks
We write the plan, runbooks and decision trees and review drafts with your team.
Exercise and maintain
A tabletop exercise tests the plan, lessons are incorporated, and an annual review keeps it current.
Ways to engage
All options are confirmed by a written quotation.
Backup and Recovery Assessment
A fixed-scope review of current backup coverage and restore capability, often the first step before continuity planning.
Continuity planning project
Business impact analysis, targets, runbooks and one tabletop exercise delivered as a fixed-scope project.
Annual review and exercise
A recurring engagement to refresh the plan after changes and run a new scenario each year.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery?
Disaster recovery is the technical process of restoring systems and data. Business continuity is broader: it decides which activities matter most, how long they can be interrupted, who makes decisions, and how work continues while recovery happens.
What do RTO and RPO mean?
Recovery time objective is how long a system can be unavailable before the impact becomes unacceptable. Recovery point objective is how much recent data you can afford to lose, measured in time since the last good copy.
Will the plan satisfy our insurer or regulator?
A documented, exercised plan is often what insurers and clients ask to see, but we do not make compliance promises. Review the plan with your insurer and qualified advisers to confirm it meets their specific requirements.
How long does a continuity planning project take?
Timelines depend on the number of departments and systems. Typically a small organization completes analysis, plan and exercise over several weeks, and the proposal sets out the schedule.
Do we need new backup systems first?
Not necessarily. The plan often reveals whether your current backups meet your targets. If they don’t, we explain the options and quote changes separately.
Related services
Products and packages
Industries we support
Service areas
Further reading
Decide how your business recovers before you need to
Book a consultation to scope a continuity planning project, or start with a Backup and Recovery Assessment.