Business Continuity Planning for Texas SMBs: Beyond Backups

Before any plan, answer: which business functions are most critical, and how long can each survive being down? This Business Impact Analysis (BIA) sets your RTO (how fast a function must be restored) and RPO (how much data loss is tolerable) per function — and those drive every downstream decision and cost.

• Critical function inventory with RTO/RPO for each
• Technology recovery — the backup and DR capability (see 3-2-1-1-0 backups and recovery validation)
• Alternate operations — how people work when the office or primary systems are unavailable (remote work readiness, secondary sites)
• Communication plan — how you reach staff, customers, and vendors when normal channels are down (out-of-band contact lists)
• Vendor/supply continuity — what happens if a critical vendor is the one that's down (see vendor risk)
• Succession/authority — who can make decisions if leadership is unreachable

Texas SMBs plan for a distinctive threat mix: hurricane season (Gulf Coast power and connectivity loss), grid instability, ransomware, and for energy operators, OT disruption. A plan written for a generic office does not survive a Category 3 hurricane making landfall near Houston.

The most common failure is a BCP that exists as a document nobody has exercised. Run a tabletop exercise at least annually, and measure your actual RTO against your stated RTO — the gap is always instructive.

Documented, tested business continuity is required under HIPAA contingency planning, FTC Safeguards, SOC 2, and is a standard cyber insurance underwriting question.

Run a Business Impact Analysis to set RTO/RPO per critical function, then build the plan around those targets and test it. See business continuity services and incident response.

• Houston managed IT
• Galveston managed IT
• The Woodlands managed IT