Q3 Business Continuity Review: Six Things to Confirm Now
Most companies treat business continuity as something to build and then file. The better habit is reviewing it on a schedule, before an incident reveals that something changed since the last time anyone looked. Q3 is nearly over. Here are six concrete things to confirm before Q4 gets here.
Why It Matters
Business continuity plans age fast. The one your team built or last updated may have been accurate in January. By September, it may not reflect the environment you are actually running. Applications have changed. People have left or joined. A cloud migration wrapped up in March. A branch office moved in July.
None of those changes automatically update your plan. That gap, between what the plan says and what is actually true, is where recovery efforts fall apart. Not because the plan was bad, but because no one checked it against reality.
A Q3 review is not about rebuilding from scratch. It is about closing the drift that has accumulated since the last time you looked. Six areas account for most of it.
The Six Things to Confirm Now
1. Did your backups actually restore when tested?
Running a backup job and verifying a successful restore are not the same thing. Backup software reports success when data is written. It does not tell you whether the data restores cleanly, whether dependent systems come back in the right order, or whether the restore takes twice as long as your recovery time objective allows. If you have not run a restore test this quarter, you do not actually know what your backup is worth.
2. Does the plan reflect IT changes made since January?
Cloud migrations, new software deployments, server consolidations, changes to how sites connect to one another: all of these have continuity implications. Most of them happen without anyone flagging the plan for an update. Walk through what changed in your IT environment this year and confirm the plan still matches. The gap is almost always there.
3. Did your recovery time targets hold during any real disruption?
If your organization had a real outage this quarter, even a small one, that is data. Did recovery take longer than the RTO said it should? Were certain systems or locations harder to bring back than expected? Real incidents are more honest than tabletop exercises. Use them.
4. Can you reach everyone in your communication tree, and do they know their role?
Communication plans built in 2023 often list people who have since left, changed roles, or switched phone numbers. Verify that every contact in your escalation chain is still current. Then confirm that those people know they are in it and understand what they are supposed to do. A recovery plan that depends on reaching the right person at 2 AM only works if that person's number is right and they know they are the one getting the call.
5. Do new locations, remote setups, or workforce changes appear in the plan?
A company that added a satellite office this year, shifted more employees to permanent remote work, or onboarded a significant number of new staff is running a different operational footprint than the one the plan was written for. Each of those changes creates continuity exposure that the original plan did not account for.
For more on how business continuity planning breaks down as companies grow across multiple sites, see Multi-Site Business Continuity: When IT Outpaces the Plan.
6. Have vendor and third-party contacts been verified?
Recovery often depends on getting help from someone outside your organization: an internet provider, a software vendor, a data center, a cloud platform. If those contacts have not been checked recently, you may be dialing numbers that no longer work or reaching support queues that route to the wrong team. Vendor relationships change. So do support processes. Verify the contacts before you need them.
What Companies Can Do
A Q3 review does not have to be a formal audit. Block two or three hours, pull the current plan, and walk through each of the six areas above. Document what you find. If something is wrong, note it with an owner and a deadline before Q4 planning begins. The goal is not a perfect plan by October 1. It is knowing where the gaps are before year-end, when budgets and priorities are being set, and fixing the ones that pose real risk.
If your team has not run a restore test this year, schedule one in the next 30 days. If the communication tree has not been verified since the plan was written, spend an hour on it this week. The quick checks tend to surface the biggest gaps.
This is also a reasonable time to revisit your recovery time and recovery point objectives. RTOs and RPOs are often set during initial planning and then left unchanged for years, even as the business has grown, added critical systems, or shifted to operations where downtime costs have increased significantly.
How an MSP Helps
One of the harder parts of business continuity is keeping the plan current when your IT team is already occupied with daily support, projects, and fires. Configuration changes happen, infrastructure gets updated, and the continuity plan does not automatically follow.
A managed services provider brings ongoing visibility that makes continuity reviews less of a periodic scramble and more of a routine checkpoint. Backup jobs are monitored and restore tests are scheduled. Infrastructure changes that affect recovery are flagged when they happen, not discovered during an incident. And when a real disruption occurs, response does not depend on whoever happens to be available.
Read: Core Managed Managed IT Services
Best Practices and Key Takeaways
Review the plan any time IT infrastructure changes significantly, not just on an annual cycle. A cloud migration or server consolidation that is not reflected in the continuity plan is a gap waiting to surface at the wrong time.
Test restores, not just backup jobs. Schedule a restore test for at least one critical system each quarter. The test does not have to be elaborate. It has to confirm that the data comes back clean and within your target window.
Assign continuity ownership to specific people, not just roles or departments. "IT team" is not an escalation contact. Name someone.
Keep communication trees current as a maintenance habit, not just as part of formal reviews. When someone leaves, update the plan that week.
Use real incidents as review triggers. If something went down this quarter and recovery did not go as expected, that is more valuable input than a tabletop exercise.
Read: Core Managed IT Backup and Recovery Services
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should a business continuity plan be reviewed?
At minimum, once a year. But the more useful trigger is change: any significant shift in IT infrastructure, staffing, locations, or the applications your business depends on should prompt a targeted review of the affected sections. Waiting for an annual cycle means the plan can be wrong for eleven months before anyone notices.
What is the difference between a backup test and a restore test?
A backup test confirms that data is being written and that the backup job completes without errors. A restore test confirms that the data can actually be recovered in a usable state, within the time your recovery objectives require. Backup success does not guarantee restore success. Both need to be tested separately.
What is a recovery time objective and how do I know if mine is realistic?
A recovery time objective, or RTO, is the maximum amount of time your business can tolerate before a critical system needs to be back online. It is realistic if your infrastructure, backup approach, and team capacity can actually meet it under real conditions. If you have never tested against it, or if the last time you tested was before a major infrastructure change, you do not actually know whether it holds.
What should be included in a business continuity communication plan?
At minimum: a current list of escalation contacts with verified phone numbers and email addresses, a defined sequence for who notifies whom when an incident occurs, and clear role assignments so each person knows what they are responsible for during a recovery. It should also include contacts for key vendors and third parties whose support you would need during an outage.
Protecting your business starts with the right partner. Core Managed helps companies secure their data, scale efficiently, and stay prepared so you can focus on running the business. Give us a call at 888-890-2673 or contact us to schedule a conversation.
For more on how MSPs turn IT challenges into competitive advantages, read our feature in the Atlanta Business Chronicle.