Internet outage
A second connection or mobile failover on the firewall, switching automatically. Usually the cheapest resilience you can buy.
Business continuity
What happens to the business on the day it all stops working?
Continuity is broader than backup. Backup answers how you get the data back; continuity answers how you keep trading. Most of the work is deciding things in advance, while everyone is calm.
- Scenario-based planning
- Written down, not assumed
- Reviewed as you change
- Know the risksand which ones actually matter
- Build in redundancywhere it earns its cost
- Agree communicationstaff, customers, suppliers
- Test the planbefore the day it is needed
Technologies we work with
- Microsoft
- SOPHOS
- Acronis
- HPE
- 3CX
- UBIQUITI
- veeam
Scenarios
Nine things that stop a business, and what we do about each
Planning works better scenario by scenario than as an abstract exercise. Each of these has a different answer, and some of them are cheap to solve.
Microsoft 365 unavailable
Cached files on managed devices, an alternative route to reach each other, and a way to tell customers what is happening.
The office is unusable
If people can work from anywhere on a normal day, they can work from anywhere on a bad one. Hybrid capability is continuity capability.
Ransomware
Isolated and retained backups, a containment procedure, and a recovery sequence decided long before it is needed.
Lost or stolen devices
Encryption as standard, remote wipe, immediate account lockout and a replacement that configures itself.
Server failure
Image-level backup, agreed recovery time, and — where the business cannot wait — standby capacity ready to take over.
Supplier outage
Knowing which third parties you genuinely depend on, what their failure stops, and what the manual workaround is.
Power failure
Protected power for critical equipment so a short cut does not corrupt anything, and a clear shutdown order for a long one.
Staff cannot travel
Strikes, weather and transport disruption handled the same way as any other remote day, because nothing has to change.
What a plan contains
A plan is a set of decisions, made while nothing is on fire.
Almost every bad decision during an incident comes from having to decide under pressure with incomplete information. A continuity plan takes those decisions out of the moment: who leads, what comes back first, who gets told, and when you declare it over.
- Which systems and processes the business genuinely cannot trade without
- How long each can be unavailable before it starts costing you customers
- Who leads, who decides, and who deputises when they are unreachable
- What staff, customers and suppliers are told, and through which channel
- The order things are restored in, and who confirms each is working
- Contact details that do not depend on the systems that have just failed
The day it all stops
Continuity board · sample company
Without a plan
Illustration with a sample company. Times are examples, not recovery targets.
How we work
Proportionate, not theatrical.
-
Assess
What the business depends on, what would actually stop it, and how long each interruption could be tolerated.
-
Prioritise
Resilience spending goes where the risk is real. Not everything needs standby capacity; some things need nothing at all.
-
Implement
Failover, backup, remote working capability and monitoring put in place, and the plan written in plain language.
-
Test & review
Walk through the scenarios, test the restores, and revisit it when the business changes shape.
Why CaminhoIT
A plan that fits your business, not a template with your name on it.
Continuity documents are easy to produce and frequently useless — long, generic, and written for an audit rather than for an incident. We would rather deliver something short that the people on shift can actually follow at seven in the morning.
- Short and usablenot a document for a shelf
- Proportionatesized to the actual risk
- Testedrestores and scenarios both
- We are on the callwe run it with you
- Suppliers mappedincluding the ones you forgot
- Kept currentreviewed, not written once
Questions
Business continuity questions
How is this different from backup?
Backup is about data. Continuity is about the business. Backup answers "can we get the files back"; continuity answers "can we take orders, pay people and serve customers while we do". Many of the events that stop a business — a broadband fault, a supplier outage, nobody able to reach the building — do not involve any data loss at all, so backup alone would not help.
Are we too small for this?
Small businesses are usually the ones who can least afford a week of downtime, and for a company of 10 to 50 people the plan is genuinely short — a few pages covering the handful of scenarios that would actually stop you. The work is measured in hours, not weeks, and a good deal of it is decisions rather than spending.
What does resilience actually cost?
That depends entirely on how quickly you need to recover. Several of the most valuable measures — failover connectivity, cached offline files, an out-of-band contact list, a documented recovery order — are inexpensive. Standby infrastructure for near-instant recovery is a different order of cost, and is only worth it where downtime is genuinely expensive. We will be clear about which is which.
Does Microsoft 365 ever actually go down?
Rarely, but it does, and the outages that matter are usually regional or affect a single service such as Teams or Exchange. The realistic plan is not to duplicate Microsoft 365 — that is not sensible for a business of this size — but to be able to keep working for a few hours: cached files on managed devices, an agreed alternative way for staff to reach each other, and a way to tell customers what is going on.
Our insurer or a customer is asking for a continuity plan. Can you help?
Yes, and this comes up increasingly often in tenders and insurance renewals. We can produce the technical continuity documentation and the evidence behind it — backup and restore testing, failover arrangements, incident response. Where the request extends into legal, financial or HR continuity, you will want that part covered by the relevant people internally; we will make sure the technical section stands up.
How often should it be reviewed?
At least annually, and after anything that changes the shape of the business — a new site, a significant system change, a merger, or a real incident. Plans go stale quietly: the most common failure we see is a contact list where half the people have left.
Want to know where you stand before planning anything? Run the IT Health Check →
Ready to get started?
Find out how long you could keep trading.
We will walk the realistic scenarios with you, tell you where you are exposed, and sort the cheap fixes from the ones worth a conversation.