The best football teams don’t just prepare to win. They prepare for the moment the game plan falls apart, an ejection, an injury, a bad call that changes everything in seconds.
The teams that recover fastest aren’t improvising. They already know who’s in charge, how they’ll communicate, and what happens next.
Business disruptions work the same way. They’re sudden, high-pressure, and rarely convenient.
An outage, a cyberattack, or a system failure exposes the gaps that stay hidden while everything is running smoothly. Most of the time, those gaps trace back to a handful of avoidable mistakes in how a disaster recovery plan gets built, or doesn’t get built, in the first place. Left unfixed, they can turn a manageable outage into weeks of lost revenue.
Mistake #1: Assuming backups are enough
Backups are one piece of a disaster recovery plan, not the whole plan. They’ll get your data back, but they won’t tell your team what to do next.
Someone still needs to know which systems come back online first, who owns each step, and how long the process should realistically take. Without that, even a clean, working backup leaves the business waiting longer than it needs to, because the key decisions get made mid-outage instead of before it.
Recommendation: Write a straightforward recovery plan that spells out what gets restored, in what order, and by whom. The Australian Cyber Security Centre lists regular, tested backups as one of its Essential Eight mitigation strategies, a useful benchmark for where your business should sit.
Mistake #2: Never testing the plan
A disaster recovery plan that’s never been tested is a guess dressed up as a strategy. It might hold up. It might fall apart the first time your team actually needs it.
Recovery plan testing is where the gaps show up while there’s still time to fix them: a backup that won’t restore cleanly, a step that’s out of date, or a system that takes far longer to bring back than anyone assumed.
Recommendation: Run the plan at least once a year, well before you’re forced to rely on it. Treat any surprise the test turns up as something to fix, not something to explain away.
→ See how a tested disaster recovery plan protects you
Mistake #3: Leaving roles and responsibilities undefined
When something breaks, someone has to make fast calls: what gets prioritised, who gets notified, what happens next.
If nobody’s been assigned those calls in advance, the team burns time working out who’s in charge instead of fixing the problem in front of them.
Recommendation: Assign roles before an incident happens. Make sure everyone knows what they own, who they loop in, and when to escalate.
Mistake #4: Overlooking communication
A recovery plan has to account for people as much as systems. During a disruption, staff need to know what to do, customers need to know what to expect, and vendors may need briefing on changes at their end.
If the usual communication channels are down too, confusion spreads fast.
Recommendation: Build a communication plan covering staff, customers and vendors, with backup channels and someone clearly responsible for sending updates. Business Queensland’s guide to business continuity planning is a solid starting point if you’re building this from scratch.
Mistake #5: Treating the plan as a one-off task
A disaster recovery plan goes stale fast. Staff move on, systems change, priorities shift, and the plan doesn’t update itself.
A plan built on outdated contacts, retired systems or old steps can slow recovery down rather than speed it up.
Recommendation: Set a recurring schedule to review and update the plan, and revisit it whenever there’s a significant change to your team, systems, vendors or priorities.
Recovery favours the prepared
A tested plan, clear ownership and a reliable way to communicate are what stop a disruption from turning into a crisis.
Fixing these five mistakes now reduces uncertainty, cuts downtime, and gives your business a clearer path back to normal when something goes wrong.
A solid disaster recovery plan isn’t only about backups and servers, it’s a strategy. We help Queensland businesses find the gaps, strengthen their business continuity plan, and build the kind of preparedness that keeps operations running when the unexpected happens.
→ Get proactive IT support that keeps you ready
If you’re not sure your recovery plan would hold up, schedule a 10-minute discovery call with our team.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about disaster recovery plans, testing, and implementation.
