Thomas Berndorfer is the CEO of Connecting Software / Honorary Consul of Austria for Madeira / Ambassador for Cybersecurity for SME Digital.
When IT disasters and total outages happen, businesses find out very quickly how prepared they were.
For some, outages hit them entirely by surprise, costing millions and cutting off key functions like internal and external communications, support, sales, contacts and documents.
But even for those with backup system solutions and secondary environments that can approximate previously used systems, operations will likely still grind to a halt.
Modern companies tend to use a web of interdependent programs to do their work and require data from all of these to function. For instance, you may have a secondary email available, but employees would find it very difficult to maintain their sales function or respond to support queries without access to up-to-date key customer data. In cases like these, software can become nearly useless without the broader network of information and support programs that employees depend on.
The difference between the companies and environments that fail and those that succeed is whether they can guarantee not only the availability of key programs but also the continuous, automatic and governed synchronization of the supporting data that makes work possible.
The Difference Makers In Business Continuity Planning
Many continuity plans are designed around restoring access to key systems, but even these can have limited effect without available data.
Employees need critical information like up-to-date contact lists, shared files, calendars and recent communications, not only user accounts and generic access. This is what makes the difference between a backup and real business continuity.
Businesses without real business continuity are liable to face much more serious consequences in disaster scenarios. For example, the January 2026 Microsoft 365 outage left many organizations unable to access Outlook, calendars and admin functions for hours. The underlying data was never lost, but without a working, synchronized path to it, teams could neither communicate internally nor respond to clients.
Clearly, as cloud outages become more severe, businesses need a better disaster-recovery solution than just a simple backup.
Naturally, the best time to start preparing for these disaster scenarios is well before they happen, given that truly sustainable long-term processes and solutions require some time to set up.
Executives will need to work in concert with their IT teams to ensure they have an accurate view of the key systems that their teams need working 24/7, as well as the potential consequences of these systems having limited access.
It’s helpful to start by developing what are commonly known as recovery point objectives (the maximum data an organization can afford to lose in a cyberattack) and recovery time objectives (the maximum time a key system or environment can be down without suffering damage).
Then, when assessing any particular business continuity solution, business leaders need to assess whether they meet these six criteria:
• Current: Does the solution have up-to-date access to current information that synchronizes continuously? Backup systems that only synchronize occasionally or at the end of the day can present challenges, as old data can be just as useless as no data.
• Complete: Does the solution make all useful and necessary data available when employees need it? Will your teams be able to pick up where they left off, or will they be scrambling to find a critical client file?
• Governed: Does it meet regulatory and compliance standards for data security? Are permission structures maintained so that users can’t access sensitive data in the new environment? Insecure backups can be vulnerable to data breaches, so ensuring they are secure is vital.
• Connected: Does the solution allow your employees to use the connected systems they need? Will any changes they make within the backup system transfer to the original one?
• Usable: Can individual users log in and gain access to the files they need to?
• Available: Are you absolutely sure it will be ready to use in a disaster scenario?
How Businesses Can Achieve Reliable Business Continuity
In a disaster scenario, any plan is better than no plan, especially when it comes to critical processes and communication. Even a somewhat simple local backup can allow employees to achieve some business-critical tasks.
But for many businesses, such as those with strict service level agreements, small periods of reduced availability can cause significant problems.
In those scenarios, having true business continuity is vital. In my experience, one key ability is having a bi-directional synchronization between a primary cloud environment and either a secondary cloud environment or a local/on-premises environment. This will require continuously and securely copying data from your primary environment to a backup one, and, crucially, vice versa.
Regardless of how it’s achieved, the goal is that, if your primary environment suffers a total outage, employees can instantly pick up where they left off, with the connectivity of systems still there, and all their data current.
Advanced business continuity strategies like these protect businesses not only from outages, but also allow them to have greater control over their data, especially if they need to change their cloud provider.
In any case, it’s vital that they start planning now. IT disasters are, by their nature, unpredictable, but can be devastating for businesses, departments and teams that rely on cloud products.
Businesses that do the hard work of setting up business continuity that their employees can actually use will reap the rewards of much greater resilience when everything goes wrong.
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