Business Continuity

Business continuity is a holistic strategy to ensure essential business functions continue during and after a disruption. Disaster recovery solutions are one component—focused on recovering IT systems, data, and infrastructure. Exigent helps design both, so your business remains resilient.

A business continuity plan (BCP) ensures your systems, data, and operations recover quickly from outages, cyberattacks, or natural disasters—minimizing downtime, reputational damage, and financial loss.

Core components include:

• Risk assessment and business impact analysis (identifying critical systems and acceptable downtime)

• Defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)

• Backup and disaster recovery (on-premises, cloud, hybrid)

• Failover, redundancy, and high availability design

• Policies, roles, and documented procedures

• Regular testing, validation, and drills

• Communication and incident response plans

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the maximum acceptable amount of time your systems or operations can be offline before causing unacceptable harm to the business.

RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time (how far back in time you're willing to go if data is lost).

Together, RTO and RPO guide how resilient your infrastructure needs to be, and they influence your choice of backup, replication, and recovery technologies.

Backups should be frequent enough to meet your RPO targets (e.g. hourly, several times a day). However, it's just as important — if not more — to test those backups regularly (monthly, quarterly, or more) to ensure data integrity, restore ability, and system recovery in real scenarios.

Assurance Managed IT Services is the foundational framework on which we build continuity. It includes proactive monitoring, system health checks, maintenance, patching, and support to reduce the probability of failures in the first place. When combined with backup and disaster recovery solutions, it helps maintain uptime and ensures faster recovery in the event of an incident.

All businesses should plan for continuity, but it's especially critical for organizations in healthcare, legal, finance, nonprofit, or any sector where data, trust, or operations are mission-critical. Small and midsize businesses are particularly vulnerable to the costs of downtime, so a strategic continuity plan is a powerful safeguard. Planning for disruption can also be impacted by location. Our clients in New Jersey and New York must plan for different scenarios than those in Denver or LA, especially natural disaster unique to those regions. 

Best practice is to review and test your plan at least annually — or more frequently if there are major changes (new systems, cloud migrations, staff changes, mergers, etc.). Regular reviews ensure the plan stays relevant, usable, and aligned with evolving risks.

Yes. Many regulatory frameworks (HIPAA, financial services, etc.) require organizations to have recovery plans, backup procedures, and documented continuity protocols. A solid BCP helps satisfy those requirements and strengthens your audit/security posture.