A technology disruption has two costs.
There’s the problem itself.
Then there’s the cost created by figuring out the response while the business is already under pressure.
That second category is where otherwise manageable outages can become much more expensive.
Here are five recovery mistakes worth addressing before the next disruption.
Mistake 1: Treating backups as the recovery plan
Backups matter.
But leadership ultimately cares about how quickly the organization can resume important work.
Even if the data is recoverable, someone still needs to determine which systems come back first, who is responsible for the process and what employees should do in the meantime.
A better question than “Do we have backups?” is:
“How does our business operate while those backups are being restored?”
Mistake 2: Never testing the assumptions
A written recovery plan can look great and still fail in practice.
Maybe an important contact changed. Maybe a recovery process takes longer than expected. Maybe a department depends on a system that never made the priority list.
Testing gives the organization an opportunity to discover those issues when the stakes are low.
The exercise doesn’t always need to involve shutting systems down. A tabletop discussion can still expose unclear responsibilities and unrealistic assumptions.
Mistake 3: Leaving ownership unclear
Someone has to make decisions during a disruption.
What gets restored first?
When are customers notified?
Which employees can keep working?
When should leadership involve legal counsel, insurance or outside vendors?
If ownership isn’t defined, technical recovery can be delayed by organizational indecision.
Mistake 4: Planning for systems but not people
Employees experience downtime too.
They need to know whether they should keep working, switch to another process, communicate with customers or wait for instructions.
Leadership also needs a way to provide reliable updates if normal communication systems are part of the outage.
Recovery plans should account for how information moves through the organization—not simply how data moves through the technology environment.
Mistake 5: Assuming the plan is finished
Recovery planning isn’t something an organization completes once.
The business changes, so the plan needs to change with it.
A useful time to revisit recovery assumptions is whenever there is a meaningful change in:
- Leadership or key personnel
- Critical vendors
- Business applications
- Locations
- Operational priorities
- Technology infrastructure
Otherwise, your recovery plan may gradually become documentation for a company you no longer operate.
The expensive part of downtime is often uncertainty
Technology cannot prevent every interruption.
Good planning can reduce how many decisions need to be made from scratch while the interruption is happening.
That’s where leadership should focus: priorities, ownership, communication and realistic recovery expectations.
As a starting point, ask:
If our most important system went down tomorrow morning, what would our leadership team wish we had decided today?
That answer is probably worth documenting.
PTC works with organizations to connect recovery planning to business priorities so downtime decisions support the operations that matter most.
