The pitfalls that await those developing a business continuity plan are numerous. This page is to inform you and elucidate some mistakes that are made. This is by no means a comprehensive list. If you have experienced a problem that did not seem obvious when
you developed your plan, please share it with us so that we may all learn.

1.) One size does not fit all - when it comes to developing a business continuity plan, this is a truism. Using someone else's plan based on conditions or requirement your company

.............................................................does not have, may result in a disaster of another type.

2.) Business continuity and disaster recovery only involve the IT personnel - nothing could be further from the truth. While the concept originated from IT, conceptually planning only for IT infrastructure leaves a corporation open to a possible catastrophe. The continuity team, which must include business owners and state a business requirement.

3.) Disasters occur rarely therefore investing a lot of money in robust infrastructure is a waste - nothing could be further from the truth. This is like insurance. Paying the premium always gives heartburn but the day you have to make a substantial claim, you are glad you paid the premium.

4.) All I have to worry about is to keep data losses to a minimum - while keeping data losses to a minimum is good practice, ensuring consistency of data at the backup site is even more important. If not, you may have to resort to a time consuming back-up which usually takes a lot of time. Conflicting data can add to the delay and thus consistency should be one of the primary drivers in disaster planning.

5.) Only one copy of back-up data is sufficient - if a copy is being made in synchronous mode and the link fails, the consistency of the remote data will be compromised temporarily till the resynchronization is complete. However, if disaster strikes during this period, data in-consistency will be permanent and may require an extensive re-working (link failure can be prevented by having WAN redundancy)