When systems go down, your business doesn’t just pause—it bleeds time, money, and customer trust. A solid Business Continuity (BC) plan keeps your critical operations running (or recovering fast) when the unexpected hits: power failures, ransomware, hardware faults, cloud outages, human error—you name it.

At CaliCoders Technology Services, we build practical, security-first continuity strategies for SMBs that fit your budget, risk tolerance, and compliance needs—so you can sleep at night and keep working during the day.

What "Business Continuity" means (in plain English)

  • Keep working: Identify what must stay online (email, EHR/CRM, phones, file access, POS) and how to keep it available.
  • Recover fast: If something breaks, know how and how quickly you’ll restore it.
  • Minimize damage: Reduce the financial, legal, and reputational impact from downtime or cyber incidents.

Key concepts (so the jargon makes sense)

  • RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How quickly a system must be back online (e.g., 2 hours).
  • RPO (Recovery Point Objective): How much data you can afford to lose (e.g., 15 minutes of changes).
  • MTD (Maximum Tolerable Downtime): The longest your business can be down without a severe impact.
  • BIA (Business Impact Analysis): A simple exercise to map apps, processes, people, and costs to downtime.

Try it now: Downtime Cost Calculator

How to use:

  1. Enter your numbers (rough guesses are fine).
  2. See your cost per hour, cost per incident, and annual cost.
  3. Optionally, add your maximum acceptable cost per incident to estimate your maximum tolerable downtime.
  4. Use the results to set realistic RTO/RPO targets and prioritize safeguards with the best ROI.

Downtime Cost Calculator

Estimate the real cost of an outage—then set the right recovery targets.

Tip: If revenue varies by time of day, run this twice (peak vs. off-peak) to compare.

Estimated cost per hour
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Estimated cost per incident
$0
Estimated annual cost (all outages)
$0
Max tolerable downtime (from your max cost)
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Model: Lost revenue (rev × loss%) + Labor waste (people × labor × loss%) CaliCoders • Security-First MSP

What you’ll learn from the calculator

  • Cost per hour: A realistic estimate of how expensive each hour of downtime is.
  • Cost per incident: Cost per hour × typical incident length.
  • Annual cost: What repeated outages could cost over a year.
  • Max tolerable downtime (MTD): Based on what you consider an acceptable hit per incident, this helps set your RTO targets.

How CaliCoders builds your Business Continuity plan

    1. Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
      We interview stakeholders, map critical processes/apps, quantify downtime cost, and rank priorities.
    2. Recovery targets
      We define RTO and RPO for each system based on cost, compliance, and risk tolerance.
    3. Resilience design
      Redundant internet and SD-WAN failover
      • Endpoint and server backup with verified restores
      • Endpoint and server backup with verified restores
      • File/version recovery and 365/Google Workspace backup
      • Email continuity and cloud failover options
      • Ransomware-resilient storage (immutability, MFA delete)
      • UPS/power protection and network redundancy
    4. Runbooks & drills
      Click-by-click recovery steps, contact trees, vendor/escalation lists, tabletop exercises, and scheduled restore tests.
    5. Monitoring & response
      24/7 alerting, incident triage, and metrics dashboards so you know your real RTO/RPO performance.
    6. Review & improve
      Quarterly reviews update assumptions, costs, and controls as your business evolves.

What’s included with CaliCoders BC services

  • BIA report and heat-map of critical functions
  • RTO/RPO matrix per application/system
  • Backup & recovery architecture + costed options
  • Incident runbooks and communications templates
  • Restore test schedule and proof-of-recoverability
  • Quarterly business reviews (QBRs) with metrics

FAQs

Is Business Continuity the same as Disaster Recovery?

Related, but not the same. BC covers keeping the business running (people, processes, communication). DR is the technical recovery of systems/data. You need both.

We use cloud apps—do we still need this?

Yes. Cloud outages, account compromise, and accidental deletions still happen. BC plans address identity, access, backups, and failover around those services.

How do we pick RTO/RPO numbers?

Use your calculator results as a guide. If downtime costs $4,000/hr and most incidents last 3 hours, your RTO should target < 1–2 hours to make the risk acceptable.

Ready to protect your uptime?

CaliCoders will turn these numbers into a right-sized, security-first continuity plan—with clear recovery targets, tested backups, and runbooks your team can actually use.

Call 909-654-6444 (Mon–Fri, 8a–5p PT) or email info@calicoders.com to schedule your Business Continuity Assessment.

Prefer a quick start? Paste the calculator results into your message, and we’ll map them to recommended RTO/RPO targets and a rollout plan.