Your Business Continuity Plan Is Probably Failing — You Don’t Know It Yet

Most business owners I speak with believe they have business continuity figured out. They’ll point to a binder on the shelf or a disaster plan tucked away on a shared drive and say, “We’re good.” But here’s the thing: in most cases, those plans are already failing. A salesperson drops off a video call. A customer gets kicked out of your checkout page. A dropped VPN connection, a choppy video call, a cloud app that won’t sync — individually, these are minor hiccups. Collectively, they are the death by a thousand cuts draining your company’s momentum.

These glitches are in no way random; they are symptoms of a continuity plan built for the “old world.” It was designed for an era of centralized offices with servers just a few steps away from work cubicles. But your business is no longer that company. It’s now a decentralized network of remote teams and cloud tools, where productivity lives or dies by its connection.

If your continuity plan was built for that world ten years ago, not only is it outdated, but it is also essentially protecting a business that no longer exists.

How do you know if your plan is quietly failing you? These three warning signs typically appear first.

Related: Five Signs You Are Headed For Startup Failure

1. You’re still protecting an office that doesn’t really exist

One of the biggest traps I see is what I call “headquarters thinking.” The plan assumes everything runs through one building, one server room and one internet line. That might’ve worked when your team was down the hall from each other. But today, your company is probably spread across dining room tables, co-working spaces and home offices.

Here’s a common scenario: a company invests in a second internet line for “backup.” But when a construction crew accidentally cuts into the trench out front, both lines go down at once because they run through the same conduit. The whole team is offline, and business stalls. On paper, it looked like redundancy. In reality, it was one giant point of failure.

A modern plan has to match modern work. That means secure, direct internet access from wherever your people are, plus the ability to automatically switch traffic to the fastest available route. If your systems can’t make that adjustment without dropping calls or kicking people out of apps, then you don’t really have continuity; you have a delay.

Related: 3 Continuity Plan Failures That Toppled Industry Giants

2. Your backup hasn’t been tested in real life

I’ve walked into businesses where leaders proudly tell me, “We’re covered, we’ve got two providers.” My first question is always: when’s the last time you pulled the plug during the middle of the day to see what happens? Usually, the answer is “never.”

That’s where things go wrong. If you’ve never stress-tested your backups under real conditions, you’re betting your business on hope. I’ve seen companies lose half a day of revenue because their failover took minutes instead of seconds. I’ve seen entire sales teams drop from their CRM because a network switchover forced everyone to log back in.

True redundancy means having genuinely separate connections, constant health checks that monitor speed and reliability, and seamless failovers that happen so quickly your team doesn’t even notice. If your plan doesn’t hit those marks, it’s not a plan you can count on.

3. You’re preparing for one problem, not several at once

Most continuity plans read like a checklist: “What if the power goes out? What if the internet fails? What if our software crashes?” The flaw is obvious; real life rarely gives you one problem at a time.

I’ve seen companies face a regional internet outage the same day one of their cloud vendors had a slowdown. I’ve seen a cyberattack target a system that was already running on backup after a circuit failure. When issues stack, downtime doesn’t just creep in; it snowballs. And if your plan doesn’t account for these overlaps, the financial hit can be much bigger than you expect.

The fix is to treat continuity like an ongoing process instead of a one-time checklist. Review your risks quarterly. Test how your systems respond when two things break at once. Identify which functions, like payments or customer support, absolutely cannot go down and make sure those always have a guaranteed path. Resilience is built through repetition and refinement, not one-and-done paperwork.

Related: The Best Defense Against Uncertainty Isn’t a Single Strategy

Resilience is built in the everyday, not the crisis

Business continuity has evolved into a core operational discipline. Your company must no longer operate within four walls. Modern, thriving businesses run on a dynamic network of remote teams and cloud services where the old rules don’t apply anymore. In this case, a static plan is a guaranteed failure.

Resilience is forged through a living strategy that relentlessly pressure-tests your defenses and adapts before a crisis forces your hand. This is how you build an unbreakable operation that maintains its momentum, secures customer trust and widens the gap on unprepared rivals.