Author: DTNK Redaktion
Published:
Keep decisions and collaboration working
An IT contingency plan explains how the business makes decisions, communicates and continues priority work during a serious IT disruption. It should identify who assesses the situation, who activates the plan, who coordinates internal and external parties and which business activities receive attention first.
The BSI Standard 200-4 describes a business continuity management system that can be adapted to an organisation’s type, scale and resources. The compact plan described here can be a starting point and an operational aid. It is not evidence of a complete BCM system or a certification.
Recovery objectives and backup testing are a separate workstream. The existing article Backup: planning recovery targets covers RPO, RTO and recovery testing; this article focuses on people, decisions, communication and temporary workarounds.
Define triggers and business priorities
Set observable conditions for activating the plan, such as an outage of uncertain duration affecting a critical service, loss of normal communications or a security incident that requires controlled shutdowns. Name the person who assesses the situation and decides when ordinary incident handling becomes contingency coordination.
Prioritise business activities, not just systems. Identify the small number of activities that must continue first, those that can wait and the minimum information and tools each activity needs. NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1 recommends assessing systems and operations, determining requirements and priorities and developing appropriate contingency measures.
Avoid describing everything as critical. Only add time targets after business owners and IT have agreed them and checked whether they are feasible.
Assign roles, authority and deputies
For each function, record its task, decision authority, primary owner and deputy. In a small business, one person may hold several functions, but deputies and possible conflicts still need to be addressed.
Useful functions include overall coordination, technical coordination, business ownership, communications and decision logging. Keep personal contact lists in a protected, maintained appendix rather than on a public website. Regularly verify names, deputies, phone numbers and supplier contacts. Related DTNK service areas include IT consulting and planning and IT security; the specific scope is agreed for each engagement.
Prepare alternative communications and accessible instructions
Assume that business email, file storage, telephony, identity services or the password manager may be unavailable. Agree a controlled alternative communication route, keep a protected offline or separately accessible copy of the plan and assign responsibility for maintaining it.
The accessible copy should contain what the team needs initially: activation criteria, roles, escalation route, prioritised activities, a pointer to protected contact details and the location of technical instructions. Avoid unnecessary copies of credentials, personal contact details and confidential architecture information. Emergency access needs its own protection, issue and return process.
NIST SP 800-61 Rev. 3 integrates incident response across preparation, detection, response, recovery and improvement. This connection is practical: communication routes and roles are prepared in advance, coordinated during the event and reviewed afterwards.
Describe temporary workarounds and the recovery handover
Define a limited, safe temporary method for each priority activity. This might be an approved paper list, a prepared form or a reduced intake process. Document required inputs, the responsible person, storage, approval and controlled transfer back into the regular system. A workaround should not create uncontrolled data sets or new security risks.
Separate three decisions: immediate containment, temporary continuation of priority work and technical recovery. Name who starts and stops a workaround, how duplicate work is prevented and how open items are handed back to normal operations.
Backup and recovery requirements remain part of the technical recovery concept. See Backup and recovery. Reporting, coordination and day-to-day assistance are covered separately under Personal IT support.
Use a small tabletop exercise to expose gaps
Start with a facilitated tabletop exercise that does not affect production systems: assume a central application and normal email are unavailable, then have participants work through decisions, communications and temporary procedures using the plan itself.
Define the scenario, assign primary and deputy roles, require participants to locate information through the intended plan copy, log unclear authority and inaccessible instructions, and assign an owner and review date to each improvement. The BSI describes tests and exercises in contingency management as a recurring way to review plan currency, procedures and staff preparedness. A tabletop exercise does not replace a technical recovery test, but it directly tests organisational readiness.
Ten checks for a usable plan
Define scope and observable activation criteria; prioritise business activities; assign overall, technical and business responsibility; document authority and deputies; agree and test alternative communications; keep essential instructions accessible when central systems fail; maintain protected contacts and emergency access separately; describe safe workarounds and return to normal operation; plan organisational exercises separately from technical recovery tests; and track every lesson with an owner and review date.
Start with one clearly bounded scenario and the people who would actually respond. A short, maintained plan that responsible staff can find and use is more valuable than a comprehensive template without agreed ownership.
Sources and editorial basis
Sources checked: 13 October 2026. The primary sources used for this article are BSI Standard 200-4, the BSI guidance on contingency tests and exercises, NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1 and NIST SP 800-61 Rev. 3. Product and guidance status can change and will be checked again during a later material update.