For many BC practitioners, the period surrounding the turn of the year is relatively quiet, making this one of the few times they have an opportunity to think. If you are in this situation, you can make the most of this interlude by considering four key issues.
[Related: A Realist’s Guide to How AI Can Help with Business Continuity]
Most business continuity (BC) practitioners know the pattern: From about the second week in January to the second week in December, we spend our time doing BIAs, handling audits, conducting exercises, developing plans, managing incidents, presenting to management, and taking care of all the other tasks needed to keep our organizations resilient. It doesn’t leave much time to think.
But the two or three weeks around the turn of the year often bring a slowing of the tempo. This creates a rare opportunity for BC professionals to step back and think about aspects of their organization’s continuity posture that tend to get overlooked during the busy months.
As we head into 2026, there are four issues that are especially worth consideration during this transitional period. Reflecting on them now can strengthen your organization’s resilience throughout the coming year.
When things slow down at the end of the year, one of the most valuable exercises for a BC practitioner is to look back at what went right during the previous twelve months. Successes are easy to overlook, especially when they don’t involve a full-blown disaster. But business continuity value often shows up in smaller, everyday situations. These might be short outages, data errors, supplier hiccups, or operational disruptions that were resolved smoothly because some planning had already been done.
Taking stock of these moments serves several purposes. Reminding the people in the BC office how much their work matters can energize them as they head into a new year.
Noting successes derived from BC activities also provides evidence that continuity is worth the investment of company time and resources. Such successes might include a quicker response to a minor outage, a smoother handling of a customer issue, or a more coordinated reaction to a data problem.
In some cases, the benefits might show up as cost savings, such as reduced downtime or efficiencies uncovered through BC analysis. For example, if the BIA determines that an application is not critical, it might allow IT to pull back on supporting it, leading to reduced licensing or storage costs.
This kind of information can be effective when shared with leadership and the broader organization. It drives home the idea that BC is not all doom and gloom; rather, it earns its keep by delivering day-to-day value.
Capturing and communicating these wins can strengthen support for the program from senior management and the business departments.
This quieter period is also an ideal time to take an honest look at where your BC program stands. This might include identifying gaps, reassessing your risks, and updating your roadmap.
The gaps uncovered might include anything from plans that haven’t been updated recently to departments that have never participated in a recovery exercise. The next step would be prioritizing and closing them. If thoughtfully managed, a little bit of work in this area can bring meaningful rewards. You don’t necessarily have to conduct a full-day exercise to bring that neglected department up to speed. A one-hour tabletop can go a long way.
This period is also a good time to reassess your company’s risks and update your BC road map. Regular risk assessments are necessary because the company and environment are constantly changing. Road maps need updating as tasks are accomplished, recede in importance, or need to be added or given higher priority.
These days everyone is looking at the impact of AI on the work they do. This transitional period might be a good time for you to think about how AI can and can’t help your team enhance your organization’s continuity.
One early read on the relevance of AI to BC is: it can be very effective at gathering and consolidating information, summarizing standards, identifying common risks, assessing the risks for a particular location, or researching historical outages tied to specific applications or SaaS providers. It can also help with classification tasks, such as quickly telling you which applications are cloud-based versus on-premises.
It’s also important to be realistic about AI’s limits. AI doesn’t know your organization’s workarounds, informal processes, or cultural nuances. It won’t replace the human interaction required for BIAs, exercises, or crisis response. It can’t design your responses or write customized continuity plans.
Used thoughtfully, AI can free up time for BC practitioners to focus on the areas where people are paramount: engaging with colleagues on BIAs and the like, developing and documenting workarounds, running exercises, and improving preparedness.
This period of relative calm is a good time to think about what exercises you want to run in the coming year. As mentioned, exercises don’t have to be all-day events to be worthwhile. Focused sessions of an hour can be enough to walk through a scenario, challenge people to respond, and surface gaps in preparedness.
Pound for pound, BC drills are one of the best investments organizations interested in resilience can make. They tend to be more immediately appealing to the business departments than activities such as BIAs. By exposing unpreparedness and creating stress, they are quite effective at driving interest in BC work generally.
Exercises also help set priorities. The areas where teams struggle during a scenario usually point directly to where additional planning, documentation, or training is needed. In this way, exercises not only test your readiness, they guide where your BC efforts should go next.
The period around the turn of the year offers BC practitioners a rare chance to step back from day-to-day demands and reflect. Looking at recent successes, identifying gaps, thinking carefully about where AI can add value, and recommitting to exercises can all strengthen resilience.
None of these activities are about starting from scratch or chasing the latest trend. They are about using a quieter moment to reinforce the fundamentals—demonstrating the value of BC work, sharpening priorities, and ensuring teams are better prepared when the pace picks up again.
If your organization would benefit from help reviewing past performance, identifying gaps, updating road maps, or designing effective exercises, MHA Consulting can help. We work with BC teams to turn reflection into action and ensure that the thinking done now translates into stronger resilience throughout the year ahead.
Further Reading
Mind the Gap: A Compliance Gap Analysis Shows Where Your BC Program Needs Work
Risk Assessment: The Best Way to Identify Your Biggest Threats
What’s Up, Doc? When and How to Perform a Current State Assessment
A Realist’s Guide to How AI Can Help with Business Continuity