I spent more than three decades running security and IT programs inside Fortune 500 companies — including director-level security roles at Campbell Soup and Motor Coach Industries — before founding Argentum IT. One thing held true at every company I worked with, big or small: the businesses that recovered fastest from a bad day weren't the ones with the deepest pockets. They were the ones who'd already decided, in writing, who does what before the outage ever happened.
I see the same pattern now with the businesses we work with across Louisville and Southern Indiana — mostly 20 to 500 employees, almost none of them with a dedicated IT department. A server fails, a ransomware note shows up, a vendor's system goes down, and the businesses that are back up in hours instead of days aren't lucky. They did the unglamorous planning work ahead of time.
Here are the five recovery-planning mistakes I run into most often, and what I tell clients to do about each one.
Mistake #1: Assuming backups are enough
Backups get you your data back. They don't tell your team which systems to restore first, who owns each step, or how long the process should take. I've watched businesses with a perfectly good backup sit idle for hours longer than necessary — not because the backup failed, but because those decisions were made live during the outage instead of ahead of time.
Recommendation: Write a simple recovery plan — what gets restored first, in what order, and who's responsible for each step.
Mistake #2: Not testing the recovery plan
A recovery plan nobody has tested is one you're hoping will work. In my experience, testing is when you find out a backup won't restore cleanly, a step is out of date, or a system that's supposed to take 20 minutes to bring back online actually takes 6 hours.
Recommendation: Run the plan at least once a year, before you're backed into a corner. Treat every surprise you find as something to fix — not something to explain away later.
Mistake #3: Not defining roles and responsibilities
When something breaks, someone has to make calls fast — what gets prioritized, who gets notified, what happens next. If that isn't already decided, your team burns the first hour figuring out who's in charge instead of fixing the problem.
Recommendation: Assign roles before an incident happens. Make sure each person knows what they own, who they coordinate with, and when to escalate.
Mistake #4: Forgetting about communication
A recovery plan is about people as much as it is about systems. Employees need to know what to do, customers need to know what to expect, and vendors may need to adjust on their end. If your normal communication tools are part of the outage — say, your email system is down — confusion spreads fast.
Recommendation: Build a communication plan for employees, customers, and vendors, including backup channels, and assign someone to own the updates.
Mistake #5: Treating recovery planning as a one-time task
A recovery plan goes stale fast. People leave, systems change, priorities shift — and the plan doesn't update itself. If it's still pointing to a contact who left eighteen months ago or a system you retired last year, it'll slow your recovery down instead of speeding it up.
Recommendation: Set a regular schedule — at least annually — to review and update the plan, and revisit it any time there's a major change to your team, systems, vendors, or priorities.
Recovery favors the prepared.
A tested plan, clear ownership, and a reliable way to communicate won't prevent every disruption. But they're usually the difference between a bad day and a bad month.
This is the kind of work I built Argentum IT around — not selling a box of technology and walking away, but sitting down with a business first to understand what's actually at risk before recommending anything. We don't quote fixed-scope work sight unseen; we start with a conversation.
If you're not sure your recovery plan would actually hold up, let's find out together. Schedule a 15-minute discovery call with our team.
