Businesses in Basildon may never have tested what happens when the power or internet goes down, simply because it hasn’t happened to them yet. A proper recovery plan comes down to four key things: tested backups, failover, a way to keep talking to people, and someone who actually takes ownership.
Imagine it’s an ordinary workday. Someone goes to take a card payment, and the machine won’t connect. The phones have gone quiet, because they run over the internet now too. Emails won’t send, the cloud system everyone lives in all day is just a spinning wheel, and the two people working from home have dropped off completely.
The power flickered, or the line went down somewhere between the office and the exchange, and in the space of a minute a room full of busy people can’t do their jobs.
For most businesses in Basildon, this is the moment they’ve never really planned for. Day to day, the technology gets kept running, so the question of what happens when it stops doesn’t really tend to come up. Until the one day it suddenly does.
Everyone’s Got a Fire Escape Plan
Every business in that building knows what happens if the fire alarm goes off. There’s a route out, a meeting point, and someone who counts heads. It gets practised routinely, even though a serious fire is something most businesses will thankfully never have to face.
An IT outage is far more likely to happen, and yet the equivalent plan isn’t always there. Businesses are always prepared for a physical emergency, so why not a digital one? If the power or the internet went down right now, most teams would be scrambling and improvising within minutes.
The government’s own research bears that out. Among small businesses, only 44% have a business continuity plan covering cyber security, and that’s fallen from 53% the year before. A power cut or a downed line might not be a cyber-attack, but the plan you’d reach for is the same one, and fewer businesses have it than did twelve months ago.
That’s the gap. The technology’s being kept running. An IT recovery plan for when it isn’t is the part that’s missing.
So What Does a Recovery Plan Actually Cover?
A good recovery plan really comes down to four questions (and knowing the answers before you need them).
Have you actually tested your backups? Most businesses have backups running somewhere. Far fewer have ever tried restoring from one. A backup you’ve never tested is a safety net you’re hoping for rather than relying on, and the worst possible time to find out it doesn’t work is the exact time you need it. Proper data backup and recovery means knowing how long a restore takes and having watched it happen, not just seeing a green tick on a dashboard.
Can you keep working if the connection drops? If the internet goes, is there a second way online, like a 4G or 5G failover that kicks in automatically? If the power goes, is there enough battery backup on the critical kit to shut things down safely or ride out a short cut? Failover is the difference between a blip and a bad day.
Can you still talk to people? When email and the phones are the things that are down, how do you reach your team, and how do your customers reach you? A plan covers this, even if it’s as simple as an agreed group chat and a holding message. Silence is its own kind of damage.
Who actually owns it when it happens? Who makes the call, who does what, and in what order? This is the part most businesses skip. Only 25% have a formal incident response plan, which means most are working it out in real time, in the middle of the incident, with everyone watching and the clock running.
“We’ve Never Needed It” Isn’t “We Don’t Need It”
Plenty of businesses look at all this and think, fairly enough, that nothing’s ever gone seriously wrong before. And that’s true, right up until the moment where it isn’t true anymore. Never having needed a recovery plan isn’t the same as not needing one. It usually just means the bad day hasn’t arrived yet.
And these days aren’t as rare as they feel. More than nine in ten UK small businesses hit an internet outage in a given year, and around one in four have no backup connection at all if their line goes down.
What tends to happen is that businesses sort themselves into two camps:
- The ones who’d tested it: they worked out the answers to those four questions in a quiet moment, checked they held up, and turned a potential disaster into an hour of mild inconvenience.
- The ones who found out live: on an ordinary workday, they discovered the backup didn’t restore, and nobody knew who was meant to be ringing the provider.
The plan is what decides which camp you’re in. That’s the whole difference between reacting to your technology and staying ahead of it.
Local Cover, Not a Call Centre
There’s one more thing that decides how a bad day plays out, and it isn’t in the plan itself. It’s who picks up when you call.
When your systems are down, you don’t want to be sitting in a queue explaining your setup to someone reading from a script three hundred miles away. You want someone who already knows your business, can get to you if it comes to that, and treats your outage as the emergency it is. Being on the ground in Basildon and across Essex is part of that. It’s the difference between a provider who logs your ticket and one who’s genuinely on the other end of the line when it matters.
That’s the case for having your IT support in Basildon handled by people who know the area, know your setup, and can actually turn up. A recovery plan tells you what to do. A local partner is the one who helps you do it; at one moment you can’t afford to be on hold.
Not Sure What Your Recovery Plan Actually Covers?
Most businesses don’t have a clear answer to all four questions, and that’s usually fine, right up until the day it isn’t. The good news is that finding out where you stand doesn’t take much. It’s a conversation, not a commitment.
If you’re not certain what would actually happen if the power or the internet went down tomorrow, let’s find out together. We’ll walk through what’s in place, what’s missing, and what’s worth sorting before you ever need it.
FAQs
What’s the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity?
Business continuity is the bigger picture: keeping the business running through a disruption, covering your people, communication and processes. Disaster recovery is the IT part of that plan, focused on getting your systems and data back after something goes wrong. You need both. One keeps the lights on; the other switches them back on.
What should a business do if it loses internet?
The businesses that cope best already have a backup route online, usually an automatic 4G or 5G failover, so work carries on while the main line is fixed. If there’s no failover in place, the immediate steps are to confirm whether it’s your line or a wider outage, switch essential tasks to mobile data where you can, and tell customers you’re aware and working on it.
How often should you test your backups?
At least once or twice a year, and after any major change to your systems. A backup that runs every night but has never been restored is untested, and the morning of an outage is the worst time to discover it doesn’t work. A proper test confirms both that the data is there and how long a full restore actually takes.
Does a small business really need a disaster recovery plan?
Yes, arguably more than a large one. Bigger firms tend to have spare capacity and dedicated IT to absorb a shock. For a small business, a day offline hits harder and recovers slower. A disaster recovery plan doesn’t need to be complicated; it just needs to exist before you need it.
How can a Basildon business prepare for a power or internet outage?
Start with the four questions any recovery plan should answer: are your backups tested, can you keep working if the connection drops, can you still reach people, and who takes charge when it happens? A local IT partner who knows your setup can work through these with you and put the missing pieces in place, so an outage becomes an inconvenience rather than a crisis.
