Plan for the worst, deliver your best: business continuity and disaster recovery in trucking

Every business in the trucking industry knows how to recover from a blown tire or a late load—but what about recovering from a cyberattack, a power outage, or a flood that knocks out your dispatch center?

This is where business continuity planning (BCP) and disaster recovery (DR) become essential. In the trucking industry, every hour counts; downtime isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s lost revenue, missed contracts, reputational damage, and even safety risks. Cyber incidents and physical disasters are inevitable. Whether it’s ransomware locking you out of your TMS or a severe storm taking out your main office, the question isn’t if your business will be disrupted, but how prepared you’ll be when it happens.

Understanding the difference: BCP vs. DR

While often used interchangeably, BCP and DR serve distinct, complementary roles:

BCP is the process of identifying critical operations and designing ways to keep them running during a disruption. This could involve rerouting dispatch, relocating staff to remote work, or transferring load planning processes to a backup system.
DR is focused on restoring your systems and data after a disruption—think restoring a server from a backup or rebuilding communications platforms after a destructive event.

These two processes work together to keep you rolling during a crisis and get your systems and data back in place afterward.

Start with a business impact analysis

Before building a continuity plan, it is essential to understand what truly matters to your business. A business impact analysis (BIA) is the first step. This exercise should include key business stakeholders from across your organization. Ensure that each line of business and each operational unit is represented. These are the people who know firsthand what systems, data, and resources are critical to maintaining functionality for their portion of the operation.

While there are many questions that you will need to consider during a comprehensive BIA, the ones listed below will give you an idea of where to begin:

What systems do we need online in the first hour after a disruption?
What downtime could we tolerate without losing freight, revenue, or customer trust?
What vendors or third parties do we rely on for operations?
Which departments are absolutely critical to day-to-day function?

Build the plan

Once you’ve identified the critical systems and processes that keep your business alive, you will need to assign two metrics to each of them:

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How quickly must this system or function be restored?
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How much data can you afford to lose (in minutes or hours) before the impact becomes unacceptable?

These should not just be considered as IT metrics; they are business decisions. For example, if your dispatch system can’t go down for more than 30 minutes, or your ELD provider must be up by the end of the shift, that defines your continuity and recovery needs for those services.

Once you understand what is critical, it’s time to build the plan before disaster strikes. While there is no “one size fits all” approach to continuity planning, and each BCP is unique to the organization for which it is created, there are certain key elements that every good BCP will contain.

At a minimum, your BCP must include the following:

Clear roles and responsibilities: Who makes decisions? Who communicates with drivers, customers, and authorities?
Alternative communication methods: If email and phones are down, how will you coordinate?
Facility contingency plans: Where can key staff work if your primary office is unavailable?
Manual process options: Can you temporarily dispatch by phone or spreadsheet if the systems go offline?
Vendor contacts and SLAs: Know who to call and what services they are contractually required to provide during a disruption.

And you DR should include the following:

Current, prioritized inventory of critical systems.
System backup and restoration processes.
Offsite or cloud-based backup strategies.
Testing procedures to ensure backups actually work.
Contact lists for internal IT and external providers.

Don’t let the first test be the real thing

Plans that live on the shelf—or worse, in someone’s head—won't help in a crisis. Much like incident response plans and tabletop exercises, BCP and DR plans must be regularly reviewed (at least annually or after major system or organizational changes). They must be tested through simulations and walkthroughs.

These tests should include all individuals and teams with specific responsibilities outlined in the plans. And critically, these plans need to be shared with, and accessible to, the people who will need to act on them—not just leadership or IT. Remember, these plans should involve the whole business. Operations, HR, safety and compliance, sales, maintenance—they all play a role in recovery. A great plan is one that everyone can understand and execute under pressure. To ensure this is the case with your plan, it is essential to conduct active testing and provide ongoing training.

Across fleets of every size, there are a number of common gaps in BCP and DR planning:

No written plan (especially occurs within smaller fleets): Don’t rely on a plan that lives in people’s heads. What happens if they are unavailable during the emergency?
Assuming IT has it covered: This is a cross-functional responsibility shared by the whole organization.
No off-site backups or backups that have never been tested: Don’t find out in a crisis that your backups won’t save you. Test them regularly.
No communication plan: Don’t forget that BCP and DR are about people and processes, not just systems and technology. Make sure that you include communication planning.
Failure to plan for physical disruptions: Floods, fires, or other facility damage is a very real threat. Don’t just prepare for technical emergencies or cybersecurity incidents.

Closing these gaps doesn’t require perfection; it requires progress. Even a basic, well-communicated plan is far better than no plan at all.

Resilience is a competitive advantage

Customers notice when you keep freight moving while others scramble. Insurers notice when you have a tested plan. Regulators notice when you document your recovery procedures. And your team? They notice when leadership doesn’t panic. BCP and DR are not just technical exercises; they’re about protecting your people, your reputation, and your ability to deliver freight.

Business continuity and disaster recovery are about resilience. They are about ensuring that when things go wrong, your business doesn’t fall apart. It adapts, responds, and gets back on the road. Start with a single question: “If we lost access to our systems or facilities tomorrow, what’s our plan?” Then build from there. Test it. Improve it. Make it part of your operational playbook, not a once-a-year checkbox.

The best time to plan was yesterday. The next best time is now.