
Business Interrupted: The Unexpected Disaster Your IT Provider Should Be Planning For

Business continuity planning covers far more than just cyberattacks. Is your IT provider actually planning for every scenario?
Most business continuity conversations start and end with ransomware. But for Minneapolis-St. Paul businesses - especially in construction and manufacturing, where physical operations depend on technology - the disasters that actually interrupt business are often far less dramatic than a headline-grabbing cyberattack.
The Disasters Your IT Provider Should Already Be Planning For
- •Severe Minnesota weather events: Power outages and connectivity loss from winter storms or summer thunderstorms can halt operations for hours or days.
- •Hardware failure: An aging server or failed network switch can take down an entire office or plant floor with no warning.
- •ISP or cloud provider outages: Even world-class providers go down occasionally, and if your business has no failover plan, so do you.
- •Human error: Accidental deletion of critical files or misconfigured systems cause more downtime than most cyberattacks.
- •Key vendor or supplier system failures: For manufacturers and contractors, a critical vendor's system going down can halt your own operations even if your systems are fine.
Why Generic Backup Isn't Business Continuity
Having backups is necessary but not sufficient. True business continuity planning means knowing exactly how long you can survive without each critical system, having failover connectivity, and having tested - not just documented - recovery procedures.
Questions to Ask Your Current Provider
- What's our actual recovery time objective (RTO) for our most critical system, and has it been tested?
- Do we have failover internet connectivity if our primary ISP goes down?
- What happens to our phone systems and email if our main office loses power?
- Have we run a tabletop exercise for a non-cyberattack disaster in the last year?
Veracity Technologies builds business continuity plans for Minneapolis-St. Paul manufacturing and construction firms that account for real-world disruptions - not just the cyberattack scenarios that make headlines.
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Published 2025-08-18 · Last reviewed December 2025