IT emergency plan: what to do when your computer fails

An IT emergency plan sounds like a lot of work, but for a small business it's often just a single page (or a note) with the most important information — and it can be the difference between "brief interruption" and "the whole day is shot."

What belongs in a minimal emergency plan

• Who gets contacted first? Name and number of your IT contact, clearly visible, not just stored in one person's head.
• Where are the credentials? A secure but reachable-in-an-emergency place for important passwords — not on a sticky note, but also not locked in the memory of one person who happens to be on vacation.
• What's the fallback workflow? If the main system goes down — is there a backup way to at least handle the most urgent things (e.g. quotes written by hand, access via a spare device)?
• Where's the latest backup, and how do you restore it? The middle of a crisis is not a good time to find that out for the first time.

The difference between "annoyance" and "crisis"

A computer that crashes is an annoyance. A computer that crashes while nobody knows where the latest backup is, who to call about the internet provider, or which fallback system to use — that quickly becomes a crisis. The technical failure is usually about the same size; the actual damage depends heavily on how prepared you were.

Review it once a year

An emergency plan that hasn't been looked at in three years might reference an employee who's no longer there, or a system that's long since been replaced. A brief annual check — are the contacts still right, does the fallback path still work — is usually enough to keep it current.

An emergency plan doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to exist before it's needed.