5 Step Guide to Business Continuity Planning (BCP) in 2021

A business continuity plan provides a concrete plan to maintain business cohesion in challenging circumstances. Click here for the key steps that can help you formulate a formidable BCP.

A business continuity plan (BCP) is defined as a protocol of preventing and recovering from potentially large threats to the company’s business continuity. This article explains what a business continuity plan is today, its key benefits, and a step-by-step guide to creating a formidable plan.

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What is a business continuity plan (bcp), key benefits of having a business continuity plan, step-by-step guide to building a formidable business continuity plan (bcp) in 2021.

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a protocol of preventing and recovering from potentially large threats to the company’s business continuity. Such a plan often aims to address the need for updated business norms and operational standards in unpredictable circumstances such as natural disasters, data breach/ exposures, large scale system failures etc. The goal of such a plan is to ensure continuity of business with no or little damage to regular working environments, including job security for its employees.

It covers everything from business processes, human resources details, and more. Essentially a BCP provides a concrete plan to the organization to maintain business continuity even in challenging circumstances. 

Below are key reasons why businesses need to have a BCP today:

  • BCP’s relevance has gone up considerably after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and was also a major testing time for organizations that did have such a plan in place. The organizations which had a business continuity plan in place were better able to cope during these unprecedented circumstances better than those who did not have any such plans.
  • The recorded number of natural disasters has increased from 375 in 2016 to 409 in 2019 Opens a new window . Globally, the loss because of natural disasters was $232 billion in 2019, according to a study by Aon Opens a new window .
  • The number of cyberattacks has also increased in all geographies and all business verticals. MonsterCloud reported that cyberattacks have skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. All this means that the organizations have to be better prepared to fight disasters. The importance of BCP can hardly be exaggerated in this context. Preparing a BCP is imperative for any enterprise, big or small, today. 

The end goal of a BCP is to ensure that the essential services continue to run in the event of an incident. For instance, if there is an earthquake where your customer service representatives operate from, your BCP will be able to tell you who will handle customer calls until the original office is restored.

Also Read: What Is Disaster Recovery? Definition, Cloud and On-premise, Benefits and Best Practices

Difference between a business continuity plan (BCP) and disaster recovery plan (DCP)

A BCP is often confused with a disaster recovery (DR) plan. While a DR plan is primarily focused on restoring the IT systems and infrastructure, a BCP is much more than that. It covers all areas and departments of the organization, including HR, marketing and sales, support functions. 

The underlying thought behind BCP is that IT systems can hardly work in silos. Other departments also need to be restored to cater to the client or for meeting the business demands. 

“Many people think a disaster recovery plan (DRP) is the same as a business continuity plan, but a DRP is only a small, yet essential, a portion of a full BCP. A DRP focuses solely on restoring an organization’s IT infrastructure while minimizing data loss. On the other hand, a BCP is a comprehensive guide on how to continue the mission and business-critical operations during a time of an unplanned disruption (natural disasters, pandemics, or malware),” says Caleb Pipkin, a security expert at Logically . 

Whether a business is small, big, or medium-sized, it needs a ‘plan B’ to recover quickly in the event of a natural disaster or a crisis and can survive the disruption. BCP helps you dust yourself and get back to business quickly and easily. It means that the enterprise will be better placed to address their customers’ needs even in the wake of a disaster. 

On the other hand, the lack of a plan means that your organization will take longer to recover from an event or incident. It could also lead to loss of business or clients. Let’s look at some key benefits of BCP.

1. It is a roadmap to act in a disaster

A well-defined business continuity plan is like a roadmap during a disruption. It allows the firms to react swiftly and effectively and maintain business continuity. In turn, this leads to a faster and complete recovery of the enterprise in the shortest possible timeframe. It brings down the business downtime and outlines the steps to be taken before, during, and after a crisis and thus helps maintain its financial viability. 

2. Offers a competitive edge

Fast reaction and business continuity during a disruption allow organizations to gain a competitive edge over its business rivals. It can translate into a significant competitive advantage in the long run. Further, your clients will be more confident in your ability to perform in adverse circumstances allowing you to build a long and sustainable relationship with your business partners.

Developing competence to act and handle any unfavorable event effectively has a positive effect on the company’s reputation and market value. It goes a long way in enhancing customer confidence. 

Also Read: Top 8 Disaster Recovery Software Companies in 2021

3. Cuts down losses

Disasters have a considerable impact on all types of business, whether big or small. Business disruption can lead to financial, legal, and reputational losses. Failure to plan could be disastrous for businesses. You may lose your customers while trying to get your business on track. In the worst circumstances, you may not be able to recover at all. A well-defined business continuity strategy minimizes the damage to an organization and allows you to bring down these losses as much as possible. 

4. Enables employment continuity and protects livelihoods

One of the most significant consequences of a disaster is the loss of employment. The loss of livelihood can be curtailed to an extent if the business continues to function in the event of a disaster. It leads to greater confidence in the workforce that their jobs might not be at risk, and the management is taking steps to protect their jobs. It helps build confidence in senior management’s ability to respond to the business disruption in a planned manner. 

5. Can be life-saving

A regularly tested and updated BCP can potentially help save the lives of the employees and the customers during a disaster. For instance, if the BCP plan for fire is regularly tested, the speed with which the workforce acts can help save lives. 

6. Preserves brand value and develops resilience

Possibly the biggest asset of an organization is its brand. Being able to perform in uncertain times helps build goodwill and maintain its brand value and may even help mitigate financial and reputational loss during a disaster. 

BCP curtails the damage to the company’s brand and finances because of a disaster event. This helps bring down the cost of any incident and thus help the company be more resilient. 

Also Read: 10 Best Practices for Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP)

7. Enables adherence to compliance requirements

Having a BCP allows organizations to have additional benefits of complying with regulatory requirements. It is a legal requirement in several countries.

8. Helps in supply chain security

A precise BCP goes a long way in protecting the supply chain from damage. It ensures continuity in delivering products and services by being able to perform critical activities.

9. Enhances operational efficiency

One of BCP’s lesser-known benefits is that it helps identify areas of operational efficiency in the organization. Developing BCP calls for an in-depth evaluation of the company’s processes. This can potentially reveal the areas of improvement. Essentially, it gathers information that can benefit in enhancing the effectiveness of the processes and operations. 

Also Read: 7 Ways to Build an Effective Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan  

The COVID-19 pandemic has put the spotlight on preparing for a disaster like never before. We make the job easier for you by listing out the key steps in building a formidable business continuity plan: 

How to Build a Business Continuity Plan

How to Build a Business Continuity Plan

Step 1: Risk assessment 

This phase involves asking crucial questions to evaluate the risks faced by the company. What are the likely business threats and disruptions which are most likely to occur? What is the most profitable activity of your organization? It is vital to prioritize key risks and operations, which will help mitigate the damage in the event of a disaster. 

Step 2: Business impact analysis

The second step involves a thorough and in-depth assessment of your business processes to determine the vulnerable areas and the potential losses if those processes are disrupted. This is also known as Business Impact Analysis . 

Essentially, Business impact analysis (BIA) is a process that helps the organization define the impact if critical business operations are interrupted because of a disaster, accident, or emergency. It helps in identifying the most crucial elements of the business processes. For instance, maintaining a supply chain might be more critical during a crisis than public relations.

While there is no formal standard for a BIA, it typically involves the following steps: 

  • Collating information: As a first step, a questionnaire is prepared to find out critical business processes and resources that will help in the proper assessment of the impact of a disruptive event. One-on-one sessions with key management members may be conducted further to gain insights into the organization’s processes and workings.
  • Analysis: This is followed by analyzing the collected information. A manual or computer-assisted analysis is conducted. The analysis is based on an interruption in which crucial activities or resources are not available. Typically it works on the assumption of the worst-case scenario, even when the chances of a risk likelihood are low. This approach is followed to zero in on the systems that, when disrupted or interrupted, threaten the organization’s very survival. This way, these processes are prioritized in the business continuity plan. 

The analysis phase helps identify the minimum staff and resources required for running the organization in the event of a crisis. This also allows the organizations to assess the impact on the revenue if the business is unable to run for a day, a week, or more. There might be contractual penalties, regulatory fines, and workforce-related expenditure which need to be taken into account while finding out the impact on the business. Further, there might be specific vulnerabilities of the firm, and they need to be considered in the BIA. 

  • Preparing a report: The next step is preparing a BIA report, which is assessed by the senior management. The report is a thorough analysis of the gathered information along with findings. It also gives recommendations on the procedure that should be followed in the event of a business disruption. The BIA report also shares the impact on the revenue, supply chain, and customer delivery to the business in a specific time frame. 

The business impact analysis report may also include a checklist of all the resources, such as the names of key personnel, data backup , contact information, emergency responders, and more.

  • Presenting the report: Usually, this report goes through several amendments before being cleared by the senior management. The involvement of senior management is crucial to the success of the business continuity plan. It sends out a strong signal in the organization that it is a serious initiative. 

Also Read: Will Extreme Weather Events Affect Your Business? Lessons From the Texas Winter Storm

Step 3: BCP Testing

Several testing methods are available to test the effectiveness of the BCP. Here are a few common ones: 

  • TableTop test: As the name suggests, the identified executives go through the plan in detail to evaluate whether it will work on not. Different disaster types and the response to them are discussed at length. This type of testing is designed to make all the key personnel aware of their role in the event of a disaster. The response procedure is reviewed, and responsibilities are outlined, so everybody knows their roles.
  • Walk through: In this type of testing, the team members go through their part in the plan with a specific disaster in mind. Drills or a simulated response and disaster role-playing are part of this. This is a more thorough form of testing and likely to reveal the shortcoming in the plan. Any vulnerabilities discovered should be used to update the BCP accordingly.
  • Disaster simulation testing: In this type of testing, an environment that simulates an actual disaster is created. This is the closest to the actual event and gives the best case scenario about the plan’s workability. It will help the team find gaps that might be overlooked in the other types of tests. Document the results of your testing so you can compare the improvement from the previous tests. It will help you in strengthening your business continuity plan. 

Frequency of testing – Typically, organizations test BCP at least twice a year. At the same time, it depends on the size of your organization and the business vertical you operate in.

Step 4: Maintenance

A business continuity plan should not be treated as a one-time exercise. It needs to be maintained , so the organization’s structural and people changes are updated regularly. The key personnel might move on from the firm, and this would need to be updated in the Business Impact Analysis and BCP. The process for regular updating of the documentation should be followed to ensure that the organization is not caught on the wrong foot in case of a business disruption. 

Also Read: Offsite Data Replication: A Great Way To Meet Recovery Time Objectives

Step 5: Communication

Sometimes executives tend to ignore communication while preparing a BCP. It is a crucial aspect, and your BCP should clearly define who will maintain the communication channels with the employees, regulators, business partners, and partners during the crisis. The contact information of the key people should be readily accessible for the BCP to work without any trouble.

In the end, the organizations should accept that despite preparing a formidable business continuity plan, several factors beyond your control may still affect its success or failure. The key executives might not be available in the event of a crisis; both the primary and the alternate data recovery sites might have been affected by the event; the communications network might be damaged, and so on. Such factors are common during a natural disaster and may lead to the limited success of the business continuity plan. 

The success of a business depends on it acting swiftly and efficiently when confronted with an unanticipated crisis. Any failure to do so results in a financial and reputational loss, which takes up a long time to recover. It can be avoided if the organization quickly gathers itself during a disaster. A business continuity plan is then of paramount importance for a business of any size. At the same time, it is crucial to ensure that the BCP is not a one-time exercise. It needs to be continuously evaluated, tested, amended, and maintained so it doesn’t let you down when you need it the most. 

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Business Continuity 101

How to prepare a business continuity plan.

preparing a business continuity plan

Why a business continuity plan is essential for your business

Maintaining stable business operations is key to keeping up with competitors and potentially surging past them when disruptions occur. Given the growing number of risks companies face today, businesses will continue to face ever-changing disruptions, and quickly acting on them requires having a solid business continuity plan (BCP) in place. Is your organization prepared to respond to the myriad of threats that have arisen in recent years?

Consider our evolving climate. From the floods in Europe and China during the summer of 2021 to the wildfires and drought that have come to characterize summers in Australia and the western United States, all corners of the world have experienced extreme weather events. Businesses must now prepare for the unexpected — a week-long deep freeze in Texas, say, or flooding in New Jersey — and the danger posed to employee safety, physical assets, and day-to-day business operations during these events.

But those aren’t the only byproducts of environmental change. New studies and analyses suggest that ongoing environmental harm caused by human development and activities is reducing our biodiversity and increasing the likelihood of future pandemics — and the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us just how disruptive that can be, particularly for globalized business operations. Supply chains have been upended and the digitization of workplaces accelerated. Indeed, an INTERPOL report documented a sharp rise in cyber-attacks against large corporations, governments, and critical infrastructure as the pandemic forced organizations to quickly move operations online.

These threats are unlikely to dissipate, further elevating the importance of business continuity plans to organizations’ success.

How did business continuity plans come to be?

Before the details of a business continuity plan can be figured out, there must first be alignment around what it even is. Some believe it’s synonymous with a disaster recovery plan, but a disaster recovery plan is actually a component of a BCP. Business continuity plans initially were born out of a need for disaster recovery planning in the early 1970s. At the time, financial companies needed to store back-up records away from computers, and recovery efforts were generally the result of disasters like fires and floods. The emphasis was on IT protection, which continued in the 1980s with the proliferation of commercial recovery sites for computer services. Globalization began to ramp up in the following decade as access to data became easier, facilitated by more complex computing systems.

That complexity prompted organizations to think more holistically about risks that could affect the smooth delivery of their goods and services. Instead of a reactive response — planning what happens after a disaster occurs — businesses began to take a more proactive approach. What could they do in advance, and what was the landscape of threats to navigate? Soon, businesses began to expand their thinking beyond IT recovery. How would they respond if a key vendor could no longer provide its service or product? What if there was a regional infrastructure outage, an active shooter situation, or a tornado that damaged critical facilities?

With the universe of harms realized, organizations understood that a more expansive plan was necessary, and business continuity meant integrating elements of disaster recovery planning but also emergency preparedness and crisis management.

Implementing a business continuity plan

Assemble your team.

The first step when preparing a BCP is identifying who needs to lead, create, and execute it. It’s best when the effort can be spearheaded from the top, such as at the board or executive level. Leadership buy-in sends a strong message throughout the organization that business continuity is a top priority.

While the C-suite puts its support behind business continuity planning, leaders may not directly manage the initiative. Instead, senior staff from departments such as IT, HR, Communications, and Operations — whichever business units the company deems critical to the continued delivery of its products and services — should come together to hammer out the BCP. You may also want to include external parties, such as security contractors and facility or property managers. Each has intimate knowledge of their unit’s processes, tools, and personnel so they can best advise on how their department will contribute to business continuity.

Gathering this interdisciplinary team will also ensure alignment on roles and responsibilities so no one is caught off guard during a disruption, but be sure each member has an on-call resource as a backup. That way, should a disruption occur while a BCP lead is away, another subject matter expert can easily step into their role.

Conduct a business impact analysis

Once you’ve established your business continuity team, conduct a business impact analysis (BIA). Identify the risks that could affect your organization and evaluate the degree of harm each could inflict upon its operations, such as regulatory fines, unfulfilled SLAs, or loss of income. Consider surveying individual team members to learn what they believe the risks are for the specific function or process they oversee, what impacts would occur during a disruption, and what resources, tools, or processes would be needed to maintain service. Organize the impacts by priority; keeping staff safe should be highest priority, followed by those with the greatest economic and operational impacts.

Identify recovery strategies

With your BIA in hand, you can determine the recovery time objective (RTO) for various scenarios. How much time do you have to restore operations to an acceptable level after certain kinds of disruption?

Assess your response capabilities. Questions to consider include:

  • Do you have the right tools available?
  • What about the right people? Who has the skills and experience to replace key staff in the event they can’t be reached?
  • How do vendors and partners crucial to your business operations plan to respond to incidents that affect your products and services?  Are their BCPs publicly available, or do you need more concrete or specific details?

Weigh the cost of the impact against the cost of the recovery strategy and decide between your options.

Develop a plan

Build a business continuity plan around your chosen recovery strategies and the teammates, partners, tools, and processes that will be needed to implement it. Benchmark your draft plan against others in your industry. 

Before obtaining final approval of your BCP, share it with a diverse group of stakeholders to ensure perspectives you may have missed are addressed. The RTOs you established may not be realistic, for example. Adjust accordingly, seek executive sign-off, and once finalized, promote your BCP internally and externally. You want to show the value of your business continuity program.

While many typically focus on return on investment (ROI) in terms of fiscal metrics, Regina Phelps, an internationally recognized emergency management and continuity expert, recommends guiding the conversation towards VOI or value on investment. First coined by technology research and consultancy Gartner, Inc., VOI refers to the intangible assets that contribute to a company’s performance. Those assets could include improved staff skills, better execution of company processes, a sharper competitive edge, and hardier business resilience — so-called “soft” investments that strengthen an organization.

Lastly, ensure your BCP is readily accessible and regularly updated. If your network goes down, for example, can employees find the BCP through a mobile app? Do you have a unified critical event management (CEM) platform like Everbridge that syncs information like new contact information and staff as they change over time?

Regularly test of your business continuity plan

Train your staff on how to execute the BCP and perform mock drills to test its efficacy. New threats are bound to crop up, and business processes are subject to constant revision, so it’s important to ensure that your BCP can respond to these. Evaluate it regularly — you may even want to bring in an external, certified business continuity professional to assist in its review.

Secure your digital transformation

The through-line in contemporary business continuity plans is digital transformation. Organizations today work best on a single platform that allows teams to communicate as one. Redundant tools risk creating silos and, worse, offering conflicting information.

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Business Continuity Planning

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Organize a business continuity team and compile a  business continuity plan  to manage a business disruption. Learn more about how to put together and test a business continuity plan with the videos below.

Business Continuity Plan Supporting Resources

  • Business Continuity Plan Situation Manual
  • Business Continuity Plan Test Exercise Planner Instructions
  • Business Continuity Plan Test Facilitator and Evaluator Handbook

Business Continuity Training Videos

The Business Continuity Planning Suite is no longer supported or available for download.

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Business Continuity Training Introduction

An overview of the concepts detailed within this training. Also, included is a humorous, short video that introduces viewers to the concept of business continuity planning and highlights the benefits of having a plan. Two men in an elevator experience a spectrum of disasters from a loss of power, to rain, fire, and a human threat. One man is prepared for each disaster and the other is not.

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Business Continuity Training Part 1: What is Business Continuity Planning?

An explanation of what business continuity planning means and what it entails to create a business continuity plan. This segment also incorporates an interview with a company that has successfully implemented a business continuity plan and includes a discussion about what business continuity planning means to them.

Business Continuity Training Part 2: Why is Business Continuity Planning Important?

An examination of the value a business continuity plan can bring to an organization. This segment also incorporates an interview with a company that has successfully implemented a business continuity plan and includes a discussion about how business continuity planning has been valuable to them.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: What's the Business Continuity Planning Process?

An overview of the business continuity planning process. This segment also incorporates an interview with a company about its process of successfully implementing a business continuity plan.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 1

The first of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should “prepare” to create a business continuity plan.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 2

The second of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should “define” their business continuity plan objectives.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 3

The third of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should “identify” and prioritize potential risks and impacts.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 4

The fourth of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should “develop” business continuity strategies.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 5

The fifth of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should define their “teams” and tasks.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 6

The sixth of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should “test” their business continuity plans. View on YouTube

Last Updated: 12/21/2023

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What Is A Business Continuity Plan? [+ Template & Examples]

Swetha Amaresan

Published: December 30, 2022

When a business crisis occurs, the last thing you want to do is panic.

executives discussing business continuity plan

The second-to-last thing you want to do is be unprepared. Crises typically arise without warning. While you shouldn't start every day expecting the worst, you should be relatively prepared for anything to happen.

A business crisis can cost your company a lot of money and ruin your reputation if you don't have a business continuity plan in place. Customers aren't very forgiving, especially when a crisis is influenced by accidents within the company or other preventable mistakes. If you want your company to be able to maintain its business continuity in the face of a crisis, then you'll need to come up with this type of plan to uphold its essential functions.

Free Download: Crisis Management Plan & Communication Templates

In this post, we'll explain what a business continuity plan is, give examples of scenarios that would require a business continuity plan, and provide a template that you can use to create a well-rounded program for your business.

Table of Contents:

What is a business continuity plan?

  • Business Continuity Types
  • Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity Plan Template

How to write a business continuity plan.

  • Business Continuity Examples

A business continuity plan outlines directions and procedures that your company will follow when faced with a crisis. These plans include business procedures, names of assets and partners, human resource functions, and other helpful information that can help maintain your brand's relationships with relevant stakeholders. The goal of a business continuity plan is to handle anything from minor disruptions to full-blown threats.

For example, one crisis that your business may have to respond to is a severe snowstorm. Your team may be wondering, "If a snowstorm disrupted our supply chain, how would we resume business?" Planning contingencies ahead of time for situations like these can help your business stay afloat when you're faced with an unavoidable crisis.

When you think about business continuity in terms of the essential functions your business requires to operate, you can begin to mitigate and plan for specific risks within those functions.

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Crisis Communication and Management Kit

Manage, plan for, and communicate during your corporate crises with these crisis management plan templates.

  • Free Crisis Management Plan Template
  • 12 Crisis Communication Templates
  • Post-Crisis Performance Grading Template
  • Additional Crisis Best Management Practices

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Business Continuity Planning

Business continuity planning is the process of creating a plan to address a crisis. When writing out a business continuity plan, it's important to consider the variety of crises that could potentially affect the company and prepare a resolution for each.

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How to Write a Business Continuity Plan Step-by-Step: Our Experts Provide Tips

By Andy Marker | October 21, 2020 (updated August 17, 2021)

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In order to adequately prepare for a crisis, your company needs a business continuity plan. We’ve culled detailed step-by-step instructions, as well as expert tips for writing a business continuity plan and free downloadable tools.  

Included on this page, find the steps to writing a business continuity plan and a discussion of the key components in a plan . You’ll also find a business continuity plan quick-start template  and a disruptive incident quick-reference card template for print or mobile, and an expert disaster preparation checklist .

Step by Step: How to Write a Business Continuity Plan

A business continuity plan refers to the steps a company takes to help it continue operations during a crisis. In order to write a business continuity plan, you gather information about key people, tools, and processes, then write the plan as procedures and lists of resources. 

To make formatting easy, download a free business continuity plan template . To learn more about the role of a business continuity plan, read our comprehensive guide to business continuity planning . 

  • Write a Mission Statement for the Plan: Describe the objectives of the plan. When does it need to be completed? What is the budget for disaster and recovery preparation, including research, training, consultants, and tools? Be sure to detail any assumptions about financial or other resources, such as government business continuity grants.
  • Set Up Governance: Describe the business continuity team. Include names or titles and role designations, as well as contact information. Clearly define roles, lines of authority and succession, and accountability. Add an organization or a functional diagram. Select one of these free organizational chart templates to get started.
  • Write the Plan Procedures and Appendices: This is the core of your plan. There's no one correct way to create a business continuity document, but the critical content it should include are procedures, agreements, and resources.Think of your plan as lists of tasks or processes that people must perform to keep your operation running. Be specific in your directions, and use diagrams and illustrations. Remember that checklists and work instructions are simple and powerful tools to convey key information in a crisis. Learn more about procedures and work instructions . You should also note who on the team is responsible for knowing plan details.

Michele Barry

  • Set Procedures for Testing Recovery and Response: Create test guidelines and schedules for testing. To review the plan, consider reaching out to people who did not write the plan. Put together the forms and checklists that attendees will use during tests.

Alex Fullick

A business continuity plan is governed by a business continuity policy. You can learn more about creating a business continuity policy and find examples by reading our guide on developing an effective business continuity policy .

How to Create a Business Continuity Plan

Creating a business continuity plan (BCP) involves gathering a team, studying risks and key tasks, and choosing recovery activities. Then write the plan as a set of lists and guidelines, which may address risks such as fires, floods, pandemics, or data breaches.

According to Alex Fullick, your best bet is to create a simple plan. “I usually break everything down into three key categories: people, places, and things. If you focus on a couple of key pieces, you will be a lot more effective. That big binder of procedures is absolutely worthless. You need a bunch of guidelines to say what you do in a given situation: where are our triggers for deciding we’re in a crisis and we have to stop doing XYZ, and just focus on ABC.” 

“Post-pandemic, I think new managers will develop more policies and guidelines of all types than required, as a fear response,” cautions Michele Barry. 

Because every company is different, no two approaches to business continuity planning are the same. Tony Bombacino, Co-Founder and President of Real Food Blends , describes his company’s formal and informal business continuity approaches. “The first step in any crisis is for our nerve center to connect quickly, assess the situation, and then go into action,” he explains. 

Tony Bombacino

“Our sales manager and our marketing manager might discuss what’s going on, and say, ‘Are we going to say anything on social media? Do we need to reach out to any of our customers? The key things, like maintaining stock levels or what if somebody gets sick? What if there's a recall?’ Those plans we have laid out. But we're not a 5,000-person multi-billion-dollar company, so our business continuity plan is often in emails and Google Docs.” 

Mike Semel

“I've done planning literally for hundreds of businesses where we've just filled out basic forms,” says Mike Semel, President and Chief Compliance Officer of Semel Consulting . “For example, noting the insurance company's phone number — you know, on the back of your utility bill, which you never look at, there's an emergency number for if the power goes out or if the gas shuts off. We've helped people gather all that information and put it down. Even if there's no other plan, just having that information at their fingertips when they need it may be enough.”

You can also approach your business continuity planning as including three types of responses:

  • Proactive Strategies: Proactive approaches prevent crises. For example, you may buy an emergency generator to keep power running in your factory, or install a security system to prevent or limit loss during break-ins. Or you may create a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy and offer training for remote workers to protect your network and data security.
  • Reactive Strategies: Reactive strategies are your immediate responses to a crisis. Examples of reactive methods include evacuation procedures, fire procedures, and emergency response strategies.
  • Recovery Strategies: Recovery strategies describe how you resume operations to produce a minimum acceptable level of service. The recovery plan includes actions to stand up temporary processes. The plan also describes the longer-term efforts, such as relocation, data restoration, temporary workaround processes, or outsourcing tasks. Recovery strategies are not limited to IT and data recovery.

Quick-Start Guide Business Continuity Plan Template

Business Continuity Quick Start Guide and template

If you don’t already have a business continuity plan in place, but need to create one in short order to respond to a disruption, use this quick-start business continuity template. This template is available in Word and Google Docs formats, and it’s simply formatted so that you can focus on brainstorming and problem-solving. 

Download Quick-Start Guide Business Continuity Plan Template

Word | PDF | Google Docs | Smartsheet

For other most useful free, downloadable business continuity plan (BCP) templates please read our "Free Business Continuity Plan Templates" article.

Key Components of a Business Continuity Plan

Your company’s complete business continuity plan will have many details. Your plan may differ from other companies' plans based on industry and other factors. Each facility or business unit may also conduct an impact analysis and create disaster recovery and continuity plans . Consider adding these key components to your business plan:

  • Contact Information: These pages include contact information for key employees, vendors, and critical third parties. Locate this information at the beginning of the plan. 
  • Business Impact Analysis: When you conduct business impact analysis (BIA), you evaluate the financial and other changes in a disruptive event (you can use one of these business impact templates to get started). Evaluate impact in terms of brand damage, product failure or malfunction, lost revenue, or legal and regulatory repercussions.
  • Risk Assessment: In this section, assess the potential risks to all aspects of the organization’s operations. Look at potential risks related to such matters as cash on hand, stock levels, and staff qualifications. Although you may face an infinite number of potential internal and external risks, focus on people, places, and things to keep from becoming overwhelmed. Then analyze the effects of any items that are completely lost or need repairs. Also, understand that risk assessment is an ongoing effort that works in tandem with training and testing. Consider adding a completed risk matrix to your plan. You can create one using a downloadable risk matrix template . 
  • Critical Functions Analysis and List: As a faster alternative to a BIA, a critical functions analysis reveals what processes are critical to keeping your company running. Examples of critical functions include payroll and wages, accounts receivable, customer service, or production. According to Michele Barry, with a values-based approach to critical functions, you should consider who you really are as a company. Then decide what you must continue doing and what you can stop doing. 
  • Trigger and Disaster Declaration Criteria: Here, you should detail how your executive management will know when to declare an emergency and initiate the plan.
  • Succession Plan: Identify alternate staff for key roles in each unit. Schedule time throughout the year to observe alternates as they make important decisions and complete recovery tasks.
  • Alternate Suppliers: If your goods are regulated (i.e., food, toy, and pharmaceutical manufacturing), your raw resources and parts must always be up to standard. Source suppliers before a crisis to ensure that regulatory vetting and approval do not delay supplies. 
  • Operations Plan: Describe how your organization will resume and continue daily operations after a disruption. Include a checklist with such items as supplies, equipment, and information on where data is backed up and where you keep the plan. Note who should have copies of the plan. 
  • Crisis Communication Strategy: Detail how the organization will communicate with employees, customers, and third-party entities in the event of a disruption. If regular communications systems are disabled, make a plan for alternate methods. Download a free crisis communication strategy template to get started on this aspect. 
  • Incident Response Plan: Describe how your organization plans to respond to a range of likely incidents or disruptions, and define the triggers for activating the plan. 
  • Alternate Site Relocation: The alternate site is the location that the organization moves to after a disruption occurs. In the plan, you can also note the transportation and resources required to move the business and the processes you must maintain in this facility.
  • Interim Procedures: These are the critical processes that must continue, either in their original or alternate forms.
  • Restoration of Critical Data: Critical data includes anything you must immediately recover to maintain normal business functions.
  • Vendor Partner Agreements: List your organization’s key vendors and how they can help you maintain or resume operations.
  • Work Backlog: This includes the work that piles up when systems are shut down. You must complete this work first when processes start again.
  • Recovery Strategy for IT Services: This section details the steps you take to restore the IT processes that are necessary to maintain the business.
  • Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO): RTO refers to the maximum amount of time that a company can stop its processes and the length of time without access to data before productivity substantially drops. Determine RTOs for each unit, factoring in people, places, and things. 
  • Backup Plans: What if plans, processes, or resources fail or are unavailable? Determine alternatives now, so you don't have to scramble. Decide on a backup roster for personnel who are unavailable.
  • Manual Workarounds: This section details how a business can operate by hand, should all failsafe measures break down.
  • External Audit Details: For regulated organizations, external audits may be compulsory. Your scheduled internal audits will prepare you for external audits.
  • Test and Exercise Plan: Identify how and when you will test the continuity plan, including details about periodic tabletop testing and more complex real-world scenario testing.
  • Change Management: Note how you will incorporate learnings from tests and exercises, disseminate changes, and review the plan and track changes.

Key Resources for Business Continuity

To fix problems, restore operations, or submit an insurance claim, you need readily available details of the human resources and other groups that can assist with business continuity. (Your organization's unique situation may also require specific types of resources.) Add this information to appendices at the back of your continuity plan.

Fullick suggests broadening the definition of human assets. "People are our employees, certainly. But we forget that the term ‘people’ includes executive management. Management doesn't escape pandemics or the flu or a car crash. Bad things can happen to them and around them, too." 

Use the following list as a prompt for recording important information about your organization. Your unique situation may require other types of information.

  • Lists of key employees and their contact information. Also, think beyond C-level and response team members to staff with long-term or specialized knowledge
  • Disaster recovery and continuity team contact names, roles, and contact information
  • Emergency contact number for police and emergency services for your location
  • Non-emergency contact information for police and medical
  • Emergency and non-emergency contact numbers for facilities issues
  • Board member contact information
  • Personnel roster, including family or emergency contact names and numbers for the entire organization
  • Contractors for any repairs
  • Client contact information and SLAs
  • Insurance contacts for all plans
  • Key regulatory contacts.
  • Legal contacts
  • Vendor contact information and partner agreements and SLAs
  • Addresses and details for each office or facility
  • Primary and secondary contact and information for each facility or office, including at least one phone number and email address
  • Off-site recovery location
  • Addresses and access information for storage facilities or vehicle compounds
  • Funding and banking information
  • IT details and data recovery information, including an inventory of apps and license numbers  
  • Insurance policy numbers and agent contact information for each plan, healthcare, property, vehicle, etc.
  • Inventory of tangibles, including equipment, hardware, supplies, fixtures, and fittings (if you are a supplier or manufacturer, include an inventory of raw materials and finished goods)
  • Lease details
  • Licenses, permits, other legal documents
  • List of special items that you use regularly, but don't order frequently
  • Location of backup equipment
  • Utility account numbers and contact information (for electric, gas, telephone, water, waste pickup, etc.)

Activities to Complete Before Writing the Business Continuity Plan

Before you write your plan, take these preliminary steps to assemble a team and gather background information. 

  • Incident Commander: This person is responsible for all aspects of an emergency response.
  • Emergency Response Team: The emergency response team refers to the group of people in charge of responding to an emergency or disruption.
  • Information Technology Recovery Team: This group is responsible for recovering important IT services.
  • Alternate Site/Location Operation Team: This team is responsible for maintaining business operations at an alternate site.
  • Facilities Management Team: The facilities management team is responsible for managing all of the main business facilities and determining the necessary responses to maintain them in light of a disaster or disruption.
  • Department Upper Management: This includes key stakeholders and upper management employees who govern BCP decisions.
  • Conduct business impact analysis or critical function analysis. Understand how the loss of processes in each department can affect internal and external operations. See our article on business continuity planning to learn more about BIAs.
  • Conduct risk analysis. Determine the potential risks and threats to your organization.
  • Identify the scope of the plan. Define where the business continuity plan applies, whether to one office, the entire organization, or only certain aspects of the organization. Use the BIA and risk analysis to identify critical functions and key resources that you must maintain. Set goals to determine the level of detail required. Set milestones to track progress in completing the plan. "Setting scope is essential," Barry insists. "You need to define the core and noncore aspects of the business and the minimum requirements for achieving continuity."
  • Strategize recovery approaches: Strategize how your business should respond to a disruption, based on your risk assessment and BIA. During this process, you determine the core details of the BCP, add the key components and resources, and determine the timing for what must happen before, during, and after a disruptive event.

Common Structure of a Business Continuity Plan

Knowing the common structure should help shape the plan — and frees you from thinking about form when you should be thinking about content. Here is an example of a BCP format:

  • Business Name: Record the business name, which usually appears on the title page.
  • Date: The day the BCP is completed and signed off. 
  • Purpose and Scope: This section describes the reason for and span of the plan.
  • Business Impact Analysis: Add the results of the BIA to your plan.  
  • Risk Assessment: Consider adding the risk assessment matrix to your plan.
  • Policy Information: Include the business continuity policy or policy highlights.
  • Emergency Management and Response: You can detail emergency response measures separately from other recovery and continuity procedures.
  • The Plan: The core of the plan details step-by-step procedures for business recovery and continuity.
  • Relevant Appendices: Appendices can include such information as contact lists, org charts, copies of insurance policies, or any supporting documents relevant in a crisis.

Keep in mind that every business is different — no two BCPs look the same. Tailor your business continuity plan to your company, and make sure the document captures all the information you need to keep your business functioning. Having everything you need to know in an emergency is the most crucial part of a BCP.

Disruptive Incident Quick-Reference Card Template

Disruptive Incident Quick Reference Cad Template

Use this quick-reference card template to write the key steps that employees should take in case of an emergency. Customize this template for each business unit, department, or role. Describe what people should do immediately and in the following days and weeks to continue the business. Print PDFs and laminate them for workstations or wallets, or load the PDFs on your mobile phone. 

Download Disruptive Incident Quick-Reference Card Template 

Expert Disaster Preparation Checklist

Business continuity and disaster planning aren’t just about your buildings and cloud backup — it’s about people and their families. Based on a document by Mike Semel of Semel Consulting, this disaster checklist helps you prepare for the human needs of your staff and their families, including food, shelter, and other comforts.

Tips for Writing a Business Continuity Plan

With its many moving parts and considerations, a business continuity plan can seem intimidating. Follow these tips to help you write, track, and maintain a strong BCP:

  • Take the continuity management planning  process seriously.
  • Interview key people in the organization who have successfully managed disruptive incidents.
  • Get approval from leadership early on and seek their ongoing championship of continuity preparedness.
  • Be flexible when it comes to who you involve, what resources you need, and how you achieve the most effective plan.
  • Keep the plan as simple and targeted as possible to make it easy to understand.
  • Limit the plan to practical disaster response actions.
  • Base the plan on the most up-to-date, accurate information available.
  • Plan for the worst-case scenario and broadly cover many types of potential disruptive situations. 
  • Consider the minimum amount of information or resources you need to keep your business running in a disaster. 
  • Use the data you gather in your BIA and risk analysis to make the planning process more straightforward.
  • Share the plan and make sure employees have a chance to review it or ask questions. 
  • Make the document available in hard copy for easy access, or add it to a shared platform. 
  • Continually test, review, and maintain your plan to keep it up to date. 
  • Keep the BCP current with organizational and regulatory changes and updates.

Empower Your Teams to Build Business Continuity with Smartsheet

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Frequently Asked Questions

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The Bottom Line

What is a business continuity plan (bcp), and how does it work.

preparing a business continuity plan

Investopedia / Ryan Oakley

What Is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)? 

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a system of prevention and recovery from potential threats to a company. The plan ensures that personnel and assets are protected and are able to function quickly in the event of a disaster.

Key Takeaways

  • Business continuity plans (BCPs) are prevention and recovery systems for potential threats, such as natural disasters or cyber-attacks.
  • BCP is designed to protect personnel and assets and make sure they can function quickly when disaster strikes.
  • BCPs should be tested to ensure there are no weaknesses, which can be identified and corrected.

Understanding Business Continuity Plans (BCPs)

BCP involves defining any and all risks that can affect the company's operations, making it an important part of the organization's risk management strategy. Risks may include natural disasters—fire, flood, or weather-related events—and cyber-attacks . Once the risks are identified, the plan should also include:

  • Determining how those risks will affect operations
  • Implementing safeguards and procedures to mitigate the risks
  • Testing procedures to ensure they work
  • Reviewing the process to make sure that it is up to date

BCPs are an important part of any business. Threats and disruptions mean a loss of revenue and higher costs, which leads to a drop in profitability. And businesses can't rely on insurance alone because it doesn't cover all the costs and the customers who move to the competition. It is generally conceived in advance and involves input from key stakeholders and personnel.

Business impact analysis, recovery, organization, and training are all steps corporations need to follow when creating a Business Continuity Plan.

Benefits of a Business Continuity Plan

Businesses are prone to a host of disasters that vary in degree from minor to catastrophic. Business continuity planning is typically meant to help a company continue operating in the event of major disasters such as fires. BCPs are different from a disaster recovery plan, which focuses on the recovery of a company's information technology system after a crisis.

Consider a finance company based in a major city. It may put a BCP in place by taking steps including backing up its computer and client files offsite. If something were to happen to the company's corporate office, its satellite offices would still have access to important information.

An important point to note is that BCP may not be as effective if a large portion of the population is affected, as in the case of a disease outbreak. Nonetheless, BCPs can improve risk management—preventing disruptions from spreading. They can also help mitigate downtime of networks or technology, saving the company money.

How To Create a Business Continuity Plan

There are several steps many companies must follow to develop a solid BCP. They include:

  • Business Impact Analysis : Here, the business will identify functions and related resources that are time-sensitive. (More on this below.)
  • Recovery : In this portion, the business must identify and implement steps to recover critical business functions.
  • Organization : A continuity team must be created. This team will devise a plan to manage the disruption.
  • Training : The continuity team must be trained and tested. Members of the team should also complete exercises that go over the plan and strategies.

Companies may also find it useful to come up with a checklist that includes key details such as emergency contact information, a list of resources the continuity team may need, where backup data and other required information are housed or stored, and other important personnel.

Along with testing the continuity team, the company should also test the BCP itself. It should be tested several times to ensure it can be applied to many different risk scenarios . This will help identify any weaknesses in the plan which can then be corrected.

In order for a business continuity plan to be successful, all employees—even those who aren't on the continuity team—must be aware of the plan.

Business Continuity Impact Analysis

An important part of developing a BCP is a business continuity impact analysis. It identifies the effects of disruption of business functions and processes. It also uses the information to make decisions about recovery priorities and strategies.

FEMA provides an operational and financial impact worksheet to help run a business continuity analysis. The worksheet should be completed by business function and process managers who are well acquainted with the business. These worksheets will summarize the following:

  • The impacts—both financial and operational—that stem from the loss of individual business functions and process
  • Identifying when the loss of a function or process would result in the identified business impacts

Completing the analysis can help companies identify and prioritize the processes that have the most impact on the business's financial and operational functions. The point at which they must be recovered is generally known as the “recovery time objective.”

Business Continuity Plan vs. Disaster Recovery Plan

BCPs and disaster recovery plans are similar in nature, the latter focuses on technology and information technology (IT) infrastructure. BCPs are more encompassing—focusing on the entire organization, such as customer service and supply chain. 

BCPs focus on reducing overall costs or losses, while disaster recovery plans look only at technology downtimes and related costs. Disaster recovery plans tend to involve only IT personnel—which create and manage the policy. However, BCPs tend to have more personnel trained on the potential processes. 

Why Is Business Continuity Plan (BCP) Important?

Businesses are prone to a host of disasters that vary in degree from minor to catastrophic and business continuity plans (BCPs) are an important part of any business. BCP is typically meant to help a company continue operating in the event of threats and disruptions. This could result in a loss of revenue and higher costs, which leads to a drop in profitability. And businesses can't rely on insurance alone because it doesn't cover all the costs and the customers who move to the competition.

What Should a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) Include?

Business continuity plans involve identifying any and all risks that can affect the company's operations. The plan should also determine how those risks will affect operations and implement safeguards and procedures to mitigate the risks. There should also be testing procedures to ensure these safeguards and procedures work. Finally, there should be a review process to make sure that the plan is up to date.

What Is Business Continuity Impact Analysis?

An important part of developing a BCP is a business continuity impact analysis which identifies the effects of disruption of business functions and processes. It also uses the information to make decisions about recovery priorities and strategies.

FEMA provides an operational and financial impact worksheet to help run a business continuity analysis.

These worksheets summarize the impacts—both financial and operational—that stem from the loss of individual business functions and processes. They also identify when the loss of a function or process would result in the identified business impacts.

Business continuity plans (BCPs) are created to help speed up the recovery of an organization filling a threat or disaster. The plan puts in place mechanisms and functions to allow personnel and assets to minimize company downtime. BCPs cover all organizational risks should a disaster happen, such as flood or fire.  

Federal Emergency Management Agency. " Business Process Analysis and Business Impact Analysis User Guide ." Pages 15 - 17.

Ready. “ IT Disaster Recovery Plan .”

preparing a business continuity plan

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How to create an effective business continuity plan

A business continuity plan outlines procedures and instructions an organization must follow in the face of disaster, whether fire, flood, or cyberattack. Here’s how to create a plan that gives your business the best chance of surviving such an event.

Professional Meeting: Senior Businesswoman and Colleague in Discussion

The tumultuous events of the past several years have impacted practically every business. And with the number of extreme weather events, cyberattacks, and geopolitical conflicts continuing to rise, business leaders are bracing for the possibility of increasingly more frequent impactful incidents their organizations will need to respond to.

According to PwC’s 2023 Global Crisis and Resilience Survey , 96% of 1,812 business leaders said their organizations had experienced disruption in the past two years and 76% said their most serious disruption had a medium to high impact on operations.

It’s little wonder then that 89% of executives list resilience as one of their most important strategic priorities.

Yet at the same time, only 70% of respondents said they were confident in their organization’s ability to respond to disruptions, with PwC noting that its research shows that too many organizations “are lacking the foundational elements of resilience they need to be successful.”

A solid business continuity plan is one of those foundational elements.

“Every business should have the mindset that they will face a disaster, and every business needs a plan to address the different potential scenarios,” says Goh Ser Yoong, head of compliance at Advance.AI and a member of the Emerging Trends Working Group at the professional governance association ISACA.

A business continuity plan gives the organization the best shot at successfully navigating a disaster by providing ready-made directions on who should do what tasks in what order to keep the business viable.

Without such as a plan, the organization will take longer than necessary to recover from an event or incident — or may never recover at all.

What is a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a strategic playbook created to help an organization maintain or quickly resume business functions in the face of disruption, whether that disruption is caused by a natural disaster, civic unrest, cyberattack, or any other threat to business operations.

A business continuity plan outlines the procedures and instructions that the organization must follow during such an event to minimize downtime, covering business processes, assets, human resources, business partners, and more.

A business continuity plan is not the same as a disaster recovery plan , which focuses on restoring IT infrastructure and operations after a crisis. Still, a disaster recovery plan is part of the overall strategy to ensure business continuity, and the business continuity plan should inform the action items detailed in an organization’s disaster recovery plan. The two are tightly coupled, which is why they often are considered together and abbreviated as BCDR.

Why business continuity planning matters

Whether you operate a small business or a large corporation, it’s vital to retain and increase your customer base. There’s no better test of your capability to do so than right after an adverse event.

Because restoring IT is critical for most companies, numerous disaster recovery solutions are available. You can rely on IT to implement those solutions. But what about the rest of your business functions? Your company’s future depends on your people and processes. Being able to handle any incident effectively can have a positive effect on your company’s reputation and market value, and it can increase customer confidence.

Moreover, there are increasing consumer and regulatory expectations for both enterprise security and continuity today. Consequently, organizations must prioritize continuity planning to prevent not only business losses, but financial, legal, reputational, and regulatory consequences.

For example, the risk of having an organization’s “license to operate” withdrawn by a regulator or having conditions applied (retrospectively or prospectively) can adversely affect market value and consumer confidence.

Building (and updating) a business continuity plan

Whether building the organization’s first business continuity plan or updating an existing one, the process involves multiple essential steps.

Assess business processes for criticality and vulnerability: Business continuity planning “starts with understanding what’s most important to the business,” says Joe Nocera, principle in the cyber risk and regulatory practice at PwC, a professional services firm.

So the first step in building your business continuity plan is assessing your business processes to determine which are the most critical; which are the most vulnerable and to what type of events; and what are the potential losses if those processes go down for a day, a few days, or a week.

“This step essentially determines what you are trying to protect and what you are trying to keep up for systems,” says Todd Renner, senior managing director in the cybersecurity practice at FTI Consulting.

This assessment is more demanding than ever before because of the complexity of today’s hybrid workplace, the modern IT environment, and the reliance on business partners and third-party providers to perform or support critical processes.

Given that complexity, Goh says a thorough assessment requires an inventory of not only key processes but also the supporting components — including the IT systems, networks, people, and outside vendors — as well as the risks to those components.

This is essentially a business impact analysis.

Determine your organization’s RTO and RPO: The next step in building a business continuity plan is determining the organization’s recovery time objective (RTO), which is the target amount of time between point of failure and the resumption of operations, and the recovery point objective (RPO), which is the maximum amount of data loss an organization can withstand.

Each organization has its own RTO and RPO based on the nature of its business, industry, regulatory requirements, and other operational factors. Moreover, different parts of a business can have different RTOs and RPOs, which executives need to establish, Nocera says.

“When you meet with individual aspects of the business, everyone says everything [they do] is important; no one wants to say their part of the business is less critical, but in reality you have to have those challenging conversations and determinations about what is actually critical to the business and to business continuity,” he adds.

Detail the steps, roles, and responsibilities for continuity: Once that is done, business leaders should use the RTO and the RPO, along with the business impact analysis, to determine the specific tasks that need to happen, by whom, and in what order to ensure business continuity.

“It’s taking the key components of your analysis and designing a plan that outlines roles and responsibilities, about who does what. It gets into the nitty-gritty on how you’re going to keep the company up and running,” Renner explains.

One common business continuity planning tool is a checklist that includes supplies and equipment, the location of data backups and backup sites, where the plan is available and who should have it, and contact information for emergency responders, key personnel, and backup site providers.

Although the list of possible scenarios that could impact business operations can seem extensive, Goh says business leaders don’t have to compile an exhaustive list of potential incidents. Rather, they should compile a list that includes likely incidents as well as representative ones so that they can create responses that have a higher likelihood of ensuring continuity even when faced with an unimagined disaster.

“So even if it’s an unexpected event, they can pull those building blocks from the plan and apply them to the unique crisis they’re facing,” Nocera says.

The importance of testing the business continuity plan

Devising a business continuity plan is not enough to ensure preparedness; testing and practicing are other critical components.

Renner says testing and practicing offer a few important benefits.

First, they show whether or how well a plan will work.

Testing and practicing help prepare all stakeholders for an actual incident, helping them build the muscle memory needed to respond as quickly and as confidently as possible during a crisis.

They also help identify gaps in the devised plan. As Renner says: “Every tabletop exercise that I’ve ever done has been an eye-opener for everyone involved.”

Additionally, they help identify where there may be misalignment of objectives. For example, executives may have deprioritized the importance of restoring certain IT systems only to realize during a drill that those are essential for supporting critical processes.

Types and timing of tests

Many organizations test a business continuity plan two to four times a year. Experts say the frequency of tests, as well as reviews and updates, depends on the organization itself — its industry, its speed of innovation and transformation, the amount of turnover of key personnel, the number of business processes, and so on.

Common tests include tabletop exercises , structured walk-throughs, and simulations. Test teams are usually composed of the recovery coordinator and members from each functional unit.

A tabletop exercise usually occurs in a conference room with the team poring over the plan, looking for gaps and ensuring that all business units are represented therein.

In a structured walk-through, each team member walks through his or her components of the plan in detail to identify weaknesses. Often, the team works through the test with a specific disaster in mind. Some organizations incorporate drills and disaster role-playing into the structured walk-through. Any weaknesses should be corrected and an updated plan distributed to all pertinent staff.

Some experts also advise a full emergency evacuation drill at least once a year.

Meanwhile, disaster simulation testing — which can be quite involved — should still be performed annually. For this test, create an environment that simulates an actual disaster, with all the equipment, supplies and personnel (including business partners and vendors) who would be needed. The purpose of a simulation is to determine whether the organization and its staff can carry out critical business functions during an actual event.

During each phase of business continuity plan testing, include some new employees on the test team. “Fresh eyes” might detect gaps or lapses of information that experienced team members could overlook.

Reviewing and updating the business continuity plan should likewise happen on an ongoing basis.

“It should be a living document. It shouldn’t be shelved. It shouldn’t be just a check-the-box exercise,” Renner says.

Otherwise, plans go stale and are of no use when needed.

Bring key personnel together at least annually to review the plan and discuss any areas that must be modified.

Prior to the review, solicit feedback from staff to incorporate into the plan. Ask all departments or business units to review the plan, including branch locations or other remote units.

Furthermore, a strong business continuity function calls for reviewing the organization’s response in the event of an actual event. This allows executives and their teams to identify what the organization did well and where it needs to improve.

How to ensure business continuity plan support, awareness

One way to ensure your plan is not successful is to adopt a casual attitude toward its importance. Every business continuity plan must be supported from the top down. That means senior management must be represented when creating and updating the plan; no one can delegate that responsibility to subordinates. In addition, the plan is likely to remain fresh and viable if senior management makes it a priority by dedicating time for adequate review and testing.

Management is also key to promoting user awareness. If employees don’t know about the plan, how will they be able to react appropriately when every minute counts?

Although plan distribution and training can be conducted by business unit managers or HR staff, have someone from the top kick off training and punctuate its significance. It’ll have a greater impact on all employees, giving the plan more credibility and urgency.

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How to craft an effective business continuity plan

preparing a business continuity plan

Let me take you back in time to the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Punk music was gaining popularity, and the Sex Pistols entered the punk rock scene with the force of a shooting star, capturing fans’ attention.

How To Craft An Effective Business Continuity Plan

But as quickly as they arrived, they quickly left the scene. When they broke up in 1978 after a period of internal conflicts, legal troubles, and their frontman’s imprisonment, fans were left both shocked and surprised.

Just like the Sex Pistols, plenty of companies experience rapid growth and success, only to face unexpected challenges and internal conflicts that result in their downfall.

In this article, we’ll draw inspiration from the Sex Pistols’ turbulent journey to explore the concept of business continuity planning (BCP). We’ll look at what a BCP is, why you need one and delve into the strategies and contingency measures that can help you maintain your rhythm and continuity, even when faced with the inevitable storms that can disrupt your operations.

What is a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan describes how you’ll continue your business when disaster hits. It is a structured strategy outlining how your organization will maintain essential functions when disaster strikes, to ensure minimal downtime and guarantee that operations continue.

Why do you need a BCP in place?

The BCP is crucial and revolves around ensuring your resilience and ability to continue operating in the face of unexpected disruptions, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, or other emergencies.

Let’s look at it a bit closer, and understand some of the key reasons to have a BCP better:

Minimize downtime

Protect revenue and reputation, compliance and legal requirements, resource allocation, maintain customer service, employee safety.

A BCP helps you minimize downtime. It does this by providing a structured approach to quickly recover and resume your critical business functions.

Example: You’re a retail company with an extensive online presence. If your website experiences a cyberattack that takes it offline, a well-prepared BCP outlines the steps to take to mitigate the attack, get your website back up in no time, and allow you to continue serving your customers.

No one likes disruptions as they result in revenue loss and can damage your reputation. A BCP helps you protect against financial losses and keep customer trust.

Example: You’re the owner of a restaurant chain with multiple locations and one of your branches has a food safety crisis. A BCP can guide you in managing the crisis, ensuring food safety compliance, and communicating effectively with customers to maintain trust in the brand and other locations.

Some industries, like the financial, and pharma industries, have regulatory requirements that mandate businesses to have BCPs in place. Failure to do so has legal and financial consequences.

Example: You’re the owner of a FinTech company. You are required by regulators to have robust BCPs to ensure customer data security and financial system stability.

When a crisis hits you need the right resources to get you back up and running. A BCP helps allocate resources effectively during a crisis, ensuring that personnel, equipment, and materials are used efficiently to address the most critical needs.

preparing a business continuity plan

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Example: You’re a manufacturing company hit by a sudden supply chain disruption because the Suez Canal is blocked again. You use your BCP to allocate available resources to meet customer demands and minimize production delays.

When all hell breaks loose you want to make sure customer experience takes a minimum blow. A BCP outlines measures to maintain customer service and communication, so customers receive timely updates and support.

Example: You run an airline and there is a labor strike. Your BCP tells you how to manage customer inquiries, rebook affected passengers, and maintain a level of service.

Let’s not forget about the well-being of your employees. During a crisis, this is a top priority. A BCP includes procedures for evacuations, remote work arrangements, and employee support.

Example: There is a fire at your workplace. The BCP outlines evacuation routes, assembly points, and contact information for employees to report their safety status.

Business continuity planning: Steps for success

That’s a lot of reasons, right? Now that we addressed the necessity and urgency of having BCP, let’s look at 5 steps to creating a successful one:

  • Analyze your company
  • Assess the risk
  • Create the procedures
  • Get the word out
  • Iterate and improve

1. Analyze your company

In this phase you conduct an analysis to identify critical activities, determine which activities must continue, which can be temporarily paused, and which can operate at a reduced capacity.

You then assess the financial impact of disruptions. This involves asking yourself the question, “How long can I operate without generating revenue and incurring recovery costs?”

As this step covers your whole company, it’s important to get key stakeholders involved from the beginning.

2. Assess the risk

Now you have a good overview of your critical processes and the impact of disruption. At this point, pivot your attention to the risks they face, how well you can handle when things don’t work as usual, and how long you can manage if things go wrong.

The goal here is to understand what could go wrong and find ways to avoid, reduce, or transfer them. This assessment will help you strengthen your preparedness and resilience.

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Think about risks specific to your industry and location

It’s important to consider both internal (e.g. an IT system failure or employee shortage) and external threats (e.g. a natural disaster or supply chain disruption) to your critical business activities.

3. Create the procedures

Once you analyze and assess, you need to create procedures.

Develop detailed, step-by-step procedures to minimize risks to your organization’s people, operations, and assets. This can include changes to your operating model, such as using alternative suppliers or implementing remote work options.

4. Get the word out

A plan is just a plan and no one will know how to act if you don’t communicate.

This step is all about communication. Integrate the BCP into your operations, policies, and company culture, and train, test, and communicate with your employees.

And don’t forget that communication is not limited to your company only. Communicate with external stakeholders, customers, suppliers, and so forth.

5. Iterate and improve

Before implementing your BCP ensure its effectiveness.

Don’t worry there are plenty more options to test your BCP. Consider involving external stakeholders or vendors as it makes exercises more realistic. Frequently train those who are accountable for executing the BCP.

After experiencing a real incident or conducting a training exercise, update your plan to improve its ability to protect your business. Keep in mind that both your organization’s development and the circumstances you operate in change, so a regular review isn’t a luxury but a necessity.

How to structure your continuity plan

Now you have a high-level understanding, let’s look at how to structure your business continuity plan.

You can find a copy of the template I use here .

Make sure to include the following sections in your BCP:

Version history

Executive summary, functions and process prioritization, plan activation, governance and responsibilities, recovery plans, crisis communication plan, emergency location and contents, review and testing.

This section shows the revision history. It includes the version numbers of the changes made, by whom, when, and who approved the changes. The revision history allows anyone reading the BCP to understand how it has evolved over time.

The executive summary provides a brief summary of the key objectives, goals, scope, and applicability of the BCP.

This chapter outlines the critical functions and processes in scope of continuation in case of a disastrous event.

This section refers to the risk and business impact assessment outcome. Its aim is to set out what triggers the activation of the plan.

Governance and responsibilities talks about who has to act when the BCP is activated. It includes the members, a description of their responsibilities, contact details of the BCP team, and the chain of command during a crisis.

This section builds upon the business continuity strategies, specifically the one chosen when a disaster occurs. It describes the detailed recovery plans for each critical function, the procedures for restarting operations, resource allocation, and recovery time objectives (RTOs).

Here you cover the internal and external communication strategies. You also address employee awareness and training activities.

Now there is a good chance the disaster will require your crucial activities to temporarily continue at a different location. This section covers all details about the location and what needs to be available at the location.

The BCP is to be tested to reduce the risk of missing things or even worse failing. Here jot down the testing procedures and document results and lessons learned.

This section includes all appendices. Think about the following

  • Supporting documents, such as contact lists, maps, and technical specifications
  • References to external standards, guidelines, or regulations
  • Training programs for BCP team members
  • Review of insurance policies
  • Financial reserves and funding for recovery efforts
  • Procedures for keeping the BCP documentation up to date

Business continuity plan example

Earlier this year, the Koninklijke Nederlands Voetbal Bond (KNVB), which is the Royal Dutch Football Association, was hit by ransomware. The cyberattackers threatened to share personally identifiable information captured and the KNVB paid over one million euros to avoid this from happening.

What could have been done to mitigate the ransomware attack risk?

The Risk of the attack to succeed could have been mitigated with:

  • Regular data backups
  • Segmentation of networks
  • Intrusion detection systems

How to ensure business continuity in case of ransomware?

In response to the ransomware incident, and to allow for continued business as usual as soon as possible, steps could include:

  • Isolating affected systems
  • Activating backups
  • Notifying law enforcement
  • Engaging with a cybersecurity incident response team

Key takeaways

A business continuity plan (BCP) is like a safety net for your business when things go haywire. It helps you keep going, avoiding downtime, revenue loss, and reputation hits. On top of that, it’s a legal must in certain industries.

To make a solid BCP, just follow five steps: figure out what’s crucial for your business, spot the risks, plan how to bounce back, make sure everyone knows the plan, and keep fine-tuning it.

Structurally, your BCP should have sections like history, a quick guide, what’s most important, when to activate it, who’s in charge, the nitty-gritty recovery plans, how communication is done, where to go in a crisis, how to test the BCP works, and some extra info.

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Understanding the Essentials of a Business Continuity Plan

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In the face of unforeseen disruptions, a robust business continuity plan (BCP) is essential to preserve the trust of stakeholders. If you are able to seamlessly continue operations even in the face of sudden challenges, stakeholders are reassured of the company’s resilience and commitment to their interests.

In this blog post, we offer a comprehensive guide to business continuity planning, how it can benefit organizations and share key insights into Developing and Maintaining an Effective business continuity plan.

What is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) is an essential blueprint that outlines how a company will continue operating during an unplanned disruption in service. It’s more than just a reactive strategy; it’s a proactive measure to ensure that critical business functions can continue during and after a crisis. The purpose of a BCP is to provide a systematic approach to mitigate the potential impact of disruptions and maintain business operations at an acceptable predefined level.

The role of a BCP is crucial in maintaining operations during unforeseen events such as natural disasters, cyber-attacks, or any other incident that could interrupt business processes. By having a well-structured business continuity plan, organizations can:

  • Minimize downtime and ensure that essential functions remain operational
  • Protect the integrity of data and IT infrastructure
  • Maintain customer service and preserve stakeholder trust

Why is a Business Continuity Plan Important

Immediate Response : A BCP ensures that there is a predefined action plan, minimizing downtime and demonstrating control over the situation.

Transparent Communication : Keeping stakeholders informed during a crisis promotes transparency and maintains confidence in the company’s management.

Inclusive Planning : Involve stakeholders in the business continuity plan development process. Their insights can enhance the plan’s effectiveness and ensure their needs are addressed.

Consistency in Service : By prioritizing critical operations, a BCP helps maintain the quality and consistency of services or products, which is important for customer retention.

The absence of a business continuity plan can lead to a domino effect of negative outcomes, including a tarnished reputation and the potential loss of future business. Stakeholders remember how a company responds in a crisis, and a well-executed BCP can be the difference between a temporary setback and a long-term impact on the company’s image and relationships.

Elements of a Business Continuity Plan

When exploring various business continuity plan examples, certain common elements emerge as critical for their effectiveness. These elements serve as the backbone for a robust BCP plan, ensuring that businesses can maintain operations and protect their reputation during unforeseen events. Here are some of the key components found in successful BCP examples:

Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis : Identifying potential threats and assessing their impact on business operations is a foundational step in any BCP plan.

Crisis Communication Plan : A clear communication strategy is essential to manage stakeholder expectations and maintain trust.

Recovery Strategies : Detailed procedures for restoring business functions and services post-disruption are indispensable.

Employee Training and Awareness : Ensuring staff are well-prepared and knowledgeable about the BCP plan is crucial for its successful implementation.

Case studies of successful BCP implementations often highlight how these elements are tailored to fit specific business models and industries. For instance, a financial institution may focus heavily on data security and regulatory compliance within their BCP, while a manufacturing business might prioritize supply chain alternatives and on-site safety protocols. Regular testing and adjustment of these plans are also a common thread, underscoring the importance of adaptability and continuous improvement in business continuity planning.

Business Continuity Plan Toolkit

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Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery

It’s important to distinguish between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan. While both are vital, a BCP is broader and focuses on the continuity of the entire business, whereas a disaster recovery plan is more technical and concentrates on the recovery of specific operations, such as IT services. Understanding these differences helps organizations allocate resources effectively and ensures comprehensive preparedness for any type of disruption. Understanding when to activate a business continuity plan (BCP) versus a disaster recovery plan is crucial for maintaining operational resilience.

To ensure a comprehensive crisis management strategy, consider the following integration points:

Pre-emptive Planning : Establish clear triggers for when each plan is activated. For instance, a BCP might be initiated in the face of a supply chain disruption, while disaster recovery would come into play during a data breach or server failure.

Unified Communication : Both plans should have a coordinated communication strategy to inform stakeholders and employees about the status and steps being taken.

Regular Testing : Conduct joint drills that test both the BCP and disaster recovery plans to identify any gaps or overlaps in procedures.

Continuous Improvement : Use insights from drills and actual incidents to refine both plans, ensuring they evolve with the changing business landscape and technological advancements.

By integrating both plans, organizations can navigate crises with agility and confidence, minimizing downtime and protecting their reputation. Tools like Creately, with features such as real-time collaboration and visual project management, can help create and maintain these critical plans, ensuring that all stakeholders are on the same page and ready to act when necessary.

Crisis Communication Strategies within Business Continuity Planning

A business continuity plan (BCP) is not just about responding to the crisis at hand, but also about how you communicate during the disruptions and the decisions you make. Here are some best practices to ensure your crisis communication and decision-making processes effective:

Clear Communication Channels : Establish predefined channels for internal and external communication. This ensures that messages are consistent and reach all stakeholders promptly.

Designated Spokespersons : Identify individuals who are authorized to speak on behalf of the company during a crisis. This helps maintain a unified voice and message.

Factual Updates : Provide regular, factual updates to keep stakeholders informed. Avoid speculation and commit to transparency.

Decision-Making Protocols : Implement decision-making protocols that are clear and allow for swift action. This includes having a chain of command and predefined criteria for making critical decisions.

Training and Simulations : Regularly train your crisis management team and conduct simulations to prepare for potential scenarios. This ensures that when a crisis does occur, your team is ready to act effectively.

By integrating these best practices into your BCP plan, you can maintain control during a crisis, make informed decisions, and communicate effectively with all parties involved. Remember, the goal is to protect your company’s operations, reputation, and stakeholder relationships during unexpected events.

Utilizing Business Continuity Plan Templates and Tools

When it comes to developing a robust business continuity plan (BCP), leveraging templates can offer a significant head start. These templates serve as a foundational framework that can be customized to align with the specific requirements of your business. Here’s why using BCP templates is advantageous:

Efficiency in Development : BCP templates provide a structured approach, ensuring that all critical elements are considered without starting from scratch. This saves valuable time and resources.

Consistency Across the Organization : Templates help maintain a uniform response strategy, which is crucial for coherent and coordinated action during a crisis.

Ease of Customization : While templates offer a general outline, they are designed to be adaptable. This means you can tailor them to reflect your business’s unique operational processes, risk profile, and recovery objectives.

Incorporating features like crisis response directions into your BCP template is essential. With Creately you can,

  • Visualize these procedures on an infinite canvas, ensuring clarity and accessibility for all team members.
  • Easily modify the plan as your business evolves, with the drag-and-drop functionality, making regular testing and adjustment a seamless process.
  • Create a central repository of information by having docs, links and attachments in the notes panel of any shape in your diagram.

Key Insights for Developing and Maintaining an Effective Business Continuity Plan

A robust business continuity plan (BCP) is not a ‘set it and forget it’ document; it requires ongoing attention and refinement. Here’s why regular testing, updates, and staff training are non-negotiables in business continuity:

Financial Protection : By regularly testing your BCP, you can identify and rectify gaps that could otherwise lead to significant financial losses during a crisis. It’s not just about having a plan, but ensuring it works effectively when you need it most.

Reputational Safeguarding : Your company’s reputation is on the line when disaster strikes. A well-rehearsed BCP means your team can respond swiftly and competently, preserving stakeholder trust and customer loyalty.

Customization for Evolving Threats : The threat landscape is constantly changing. Regular BCP reviews allow you to tailor your plan to new types of risks, ensuring your business remains resilient against the unforeseen.

Empowered Employees : Training staff on the BCP turns theory into practice. When every team member knows their role in a crisis, response times improve, and confusion is minimized.

Remember, a BCP is a living document. It thrives on the feedback loop created by regular drills and updates, ensuring that when a crisis does occur, your business is prepared not just to survive, but to continue operations with minimal disruption.

Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully.

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Hansani has a background in journalism and marketing communications. She loves reading and writing about tech innovations. She enjoys writing poetry, travelling and photography.

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A step-by-step guide to writing an effective business continuity plan.

Posted Aug 30, 2022

What is a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan is a written document that describes the emergency procedures that should happen if a business-critical process fails.

Several sources can threaten businesses. Sometimes, disruption can take the form of Force Majeure circumstances, like extreme weather or political unrest. Other circumstances are less obvious, but just as disruptive: supply chain issues, web server downtime or power outages can leave permanent damage to a business’s finances after a certain amount of time.

Businesses must prevent unwanted downtime to ensure critical functions and services aren’t affected. The best way to ensure a consistent and effective response to potential issues is to implement a robust, documented business continuity plan.

Learn more with our in-depth guide to business continuity.

What is the purpose of a business continuity plan?

A strategically structured and rehearsed business continuity plan provides a number of benefits to both employees and the company itself.

With improvements to communication, technology and resilience, here are a number of examples of the positives that you can expect from a business continuity plan:

Helps your business to survive a disruptive event — Ensuring you have a robust plan in place will enable your business to recover in the shortest possible timeframe from an incident.

Protect your organisation’s reputation and brand — Whether it’s in the eyes of the public, suppliers and/or clients you work with, showing that you can respond well to the unexpected will instil confidence in your business and help to mitigate any negative feelings due to disruptions.

Strengthen your relationship with third parties and subsidiaries — With an effective business continuity plan, you’ll demonstrate that your company is being run well from the top down. By showing that you’re a reliable partner that can be depended on, you’ll attract new business and solidify your relationship with current clients and service providers.

Ensure staff safety — The well-being of your employees is a natural factor in a business continuity plan. By ensuring your team is looked after and knows what the procedure is during disruptions, you can establish clear roles and responsibilities to keep everyone under your care safe in an emergency.

Meet regulatory standards — Globally, there are corporate governance regulations that require directors and key stakeholders to exercise reasonable care, skill and diligence to mitigate risks facing an organisation. With an effective business continuity plan in place, you can ensure you’re meeting the requirements of a growing body of legislation.

What does a good business continuity plan look like?

The three key elements of a business continuity plan are:

1. Resilience

Businesses can increase their resilience by designing critical functions and infrastructures to protect against specific scenarios. Examples include; data redundancy, staffing rotations and maintaining a surplus of capacity. If implemented efficiently, resilience in business continuity can even keep essential services running on-site or remotely without interruption to daily operations.

2. Recovery

There’s no way an organisation can prepare for every eventuality. But with rapid recovery, you can future-proof your business by ensuring you have strategies in place to restore business functions in an emergency. With recovery time objectives for different systems, you can analyse and prioritise which needs recovering first.

3. Contingency

A contingency plan ensures that an organisation has procedures in place to distribute and delegate responsibilities for a range of external scenarios. These can include replacing hardware, sourcing an emergency workspace and contracting third-party vendors for assistance.

Who is responsible for a business continuity plan?

To ensure your organisation’s readiness, it’s important to designate who will be responsible for implementing and managing your business continuity plan. For small businesses, a single individual could be tasked with writing a business continuity plan. Or for larger organisations, a whole team could be involved with developing a business continuity plan.

In such cases, business unit leaders — such as payroll, corporate travel, human resources and security — will be given the responsibility of creating their respective unit’s business continuity plan with a program manager overseeing the process.

It is essential to make sure each person understanding their responsibilities and that there are clear lines of communication between employees and external stakeholders, in order to keep everything as smooth as possible during an disruptive scenario.

What is the first step in writing a business continuity plan?

The first step you should take when preparing to write a business continuity plan is to conduct a full Business Impact Assessment (BIA).

A BIA predicts the consequences of a significant disruption to your business processes. It clarifies the potential losses that could be incurred in each circumstance.

A BIA should include the following:

Potential losses — What would your lost sales and income look like for each hour of downtime, or each day?

Delayed sales — Could disruption create cash flow issues for you by delaying your sales or income? If so, to what extent? What lines of credit would you have to rely on?

Increased expenses — How much would you have to spend on resources to mitigate the issue? Think about things like overtime, outsourcing, and costs associated with expediting business-critical activities.

Regulatory fines — How much could you be fined by regulators for breaches to things like data privacy or health and safety?

Contractual penalties — Are there any charges you could incur for failing to meet SLAs with your business partners?

Customer satisfaction — How much damage to your public reputation could a disruption have? You can quantify by thinking of the number of additional negative reviews you could receive for each day of delays.

Delay of new business plans — Would you need to push back any planned launches or new business agreements while you deal with disruptions?

Writing your plan: Step-by-step instructions

Identify your business-critical processes — Critical business processes are those necessary for the survival of the company in the case of loss of revenue, customer service interruption or reputation damage. E.g. Manufacturing — what you would need to keep your production line going. Finance — how to recover important documents that contain sensitive information. IT — is home working feasible for your business?

Specify the target recovery time for these processes — How long would it take for the loss of a business-critical process to do irreparable damage to your business? Your target recovery time for each process you identified should be within this window. Determine how long you could tolerate a disruption: this is known as a recovery time objective (RTO). Your business continuity plan should enable you to mitigate disruptions within this time window.

Define the specific resources needed for each process — Once you’ve identified how long you’ll need to restore a process, you’ll need to outline everything you’ll need to do so, and plan within that time frame. You could split this into internal resources (key people in your organisation, passwords, office space, specialist equipment) and external resources (e.g. supplies, transportation). Along with identifying how readily available they can be, and for how long you’ll need them.

Describe the steps needed to restore each process — If your business is disrupted by an IT failure, fire, flood or an extreme weather event, what is your plan to address this? Devise a backup plan for each key operation you have, detailing who to contact, what resources you’ll need, and how much you might need to spend in order to restore each process.

Decide on a schedule to update the information — Once you’ve compiled the above 4 points, you’ll have a strong business continuity plan that you can action. But it won’t be bulletproof forever. As your business evolves, so will the technology it uses and the relationships it has. Therefore, you need to plan ways to keep the information up-to-date. It might be that you decide on a regular date that the whole plan needs to be revisited, whether that’s yearly, quarterly or even monthly. Alternatively, you might decide it’s better to update small elements of the plan as and when they change: e.g. if a password to a critical folder is changed, there’s someone in your organisation who is responsible for updating your business continuity plan accordingly.

What are the four P’s of business continuity planning?

The four P’s of business continuity are:

People — This covers your staff, customers and clients.

Processes — This includes the technology and strategies your business uses to keep everything running.

Premises — Covers the buildings and spaces from which your business operates.

Providers — This includes parties that your business relies on for getting resources, like your suppliers and partners.

You can use the four P’s when reviewing the initial draft of your business continuity plan to ensure you’ve considered the impact on each of them at every stage.

For example, how might your plan to recover important documents out of working hours impact your staff? How hard would it be to access the premises? When should you notify your clients and business partners?

What is the most important part of a business continuity plan?

Every element of your business continuity plan is important, but perhaps the most critical part to get right is how you plan to respond to potential issues. It’s advantageous to have precise calculations about potential losses and the impact of your business relationships, but without a clear and effective way of reacting to disruptions, your business will incur serious — and sometimes irreparable — financial damage.

Business continuity plan template

We’ve prepared an example business continuity plan to get you started.

1. Objective of the plan

Open with a short summary of the ‘why’ behind the how. Explain clearly and succinctly that the aim of your business continuity plan is to protect your business in the event of a disruption to business-critical processes.

2. Business-critical processes checklist

Your plan will need to contain a list of its most important processes. Below are a few examples:

3. Recovery plan

For each critical function you listed in step (2), you’ll need to specify a comprehensive, tailored recovery plan that should be followed in order to get the process back up and running within your RTO.

4. Contact list

Create lists of staff, suppliers and insurers that should be contacted in case of an emergency.

List of key staff: example

Supplier list: example

List of insurers: example

Ensure your business continuity

If you want to protect your business against all eventualities, putting in place reliable business continuity plans is a crucial step.

CMAC specialises in providing emergency assistance to businesses experiencing transport disruptions to keep things running smoothly and minimise potential losses. Learn more about CMAC’s full suite of industry-leading recovery solutions , from ground transport to emergency accommodation.

Other useful guides

What is Business Continuity and why is it important for your business? | CMAC Group

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Vishnu Prasad

A 5-Step Guide to create a Business Continuity Plan

In this blog, we’ll take you through 5 steps to help you create a strong and effective business continuity plan, and implement it in your organization.

What is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan is a series of steps or procedures that a company will follow to ensure continued operations when faced with an unprecedented emergency situation. These situations could range from natural disasters, public health emergencies or even human error.

Staying ahead and planning for such crises will help your business stay in the market. Business continuity plans should list all the processes that need to be performed if a major business disruption occurs.

Business continuity plans could sound alien to most small businesses. A data health study claims that only less than 50% of organizations with a small IT team (1-5 members) have a business continuity plan in place. This is due to the general lack of awareness amongst small and medium-sized businesses and their scope limitations. But, it is always good to have at least a rudimentary business continuity plan in place, as we hardly know when a disaster strikes. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has left global organizations startled, as governments have implemented nation-wide lockdowns forcing employees to work from their homes. In situations like these, where the health and safety of your employees are of prime importance, business continuity plans can seem godsent. This way, your employees can take care of themselves and can also continue performing their daily activities by working remotely .

Watch: How to ensure business continuity with the help of IT?

How to draft a solid Business Continuity Plan?

It is important to note that the nature of the crisis/emergency heavily determines the nature of the business continuity plan. The current COVID-19 pandemic is declared as a public health emergency by the WHO, whereas most business continuity plans are designed for local/regional disasters like fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, or floods. With natural disasters like these, infrastructure damage is severe. Whereas with pandemics, there are no inherent infrastructure damages, but your workforce might be forced to work remotely from their homes. The bottom line is, your business continuity plan should suit the emergency in concern, and be custom made for your organizational needs.

Step 1: Form a Business Continuity Team

Before you get started, it is essential to have the right team to create and implement a business continuity plan in your organization. A business continuity team can be split into two sub-functions: 

  • The Command Center team: This team consists of the incident response team, crisis, and recovery management teams. These teams, in turn, consist of Information officers, program managers and coordinators, executive managers, service desk managers, and communications managers. This team should be led by the Chief Information Officer, to ensure senior management buy-in.
  • The Task-Oriented team: This team is made of public relations, legal, procurement, cybersecurity, IT service desk , and communications teams. 
  • Assign clear responsibilities for each role and ensure there are no overlaps. 
  • The members of this team are responsible for executing the business continuity plan and will prepare policies for the project, train additional team members and identify processes to streamline the implementation of the business continuity plan.

Step 2: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis

Emergency situations might not offer enough time to assess business impact in case your business doesn’t have a business continuity plan already in place. 

  • Business Impact Analysis is the process of identifying time-sensitive or critical functions, their vulnerability, the resources that support them and the impact caused in the event of a prolonged disruption. 
  • The risk assessment process can help you identify the vulnerabilities. It is crucial to identify these weaknesses as they can make your assets/resources more susceptible to damage caused by the disaster. 

A thorough business impact analysis is key to gathering the information needed to develop mitigation strategies and recovery plans. 

Step 3: Identify Stakeholders and Critical Functions

  • Start by identifying the key stakeholders of each business unit in your company. Narrow down on critical resources and functions without which the organization cannot function smoothly. 
  • Establish contact points with these key resources, as multiple teams in your organization, might be dependent on them for their smooth operations. Ensure that the contact information is up-to-date. 
  • Identify and map the dependencies between various business areas and critical functions.
  • Document the acceptable minimum levels of operations for each of these functions and how they will ensure the continuity of the business and to what extent.

Step 4: Draft the Recovery Plan

With all the information from the previous stages, draft the baseline plan—to decide the various business areas and critical functions that will be covered under your business continuity plan. The draft should include the following key aspects:

  • The objectives and mission statement of the business continuity plan
  • Information about the business continuity team members, their roles and responsibilities
  • Key stakeholders and critical functions involved in the business continuity plan
  • Business Impact Analysis report
  • Gap Analysis (the resources you have vs the resources you need)
  • Prevention, response, mitigation, and recovery strategies
  • Testing schedules for the business continuity plan

Step 5: Review and Revise your plan

Once you have the plan in place, it is crucial to test it often. This lets you identify the gaps and flaws in your plan and help you address them before another disaster strikes. The importance of testing a business continuity plan cannot be emphasized enough. An untested plan can prove to be expensive for the company, both in terms of time and costs. With that said, in order to test your BCP, you don’t have to shut shop. Instead, you can conduct table-top exercises wherein emergency scenarios are hypothetically created (inside a meeting room, of course!) and the team members can review how robust the plan is. All business continuity plans should be subjected to continual improvement.

Business continuity planning is vast and never-ending. This is primarily because of the changing needs and objectives of an organization. But if you follow these 5 steps to create a business continuity plan (keeping in mind the unique needs of your organization), you will be able to get the fundamentals right and ensure that your business stays afloat during the times of crisis.

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Ecommerce Business Continuity Planning: 7 Steps to Assess Risk and Plan for the Unexpected

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In 2018, a ransomware attack  hobbled the City of Atlanta. The disruption to their computer systems impacted city services including police and court records, parking, and utilities. Workers were forced to complete paperwork by hand.

In the end, the cyberattack cost the City of Atlanta $17 million — even though the ransom was only $52,000.

The City of Atlanta was caught off guard, with out-of-date software and a number of other IT vulnerabilities.

A story about a German telecom business , however, shows what happens when a plan goes right. When workers discovered a fire inching closer to one of their crucial facilities, they engaged their incident management system to notify and mobilize employees and emergency responders.

The German company’s fast reaction time — facilitated in part by a solid business continuity plan — along with a redundant network design had the facility back in service in just hours.

A solid business continuity plan (BCP) left the German company with better emergency management and the ability to bounce back quickly.

What is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan details processes and procedures that will help keep operations up and running — or restore them as quickly as possible — in the event of a major disaster, whether it be a physical disaster (e.g., extreme weather event) or a technological one (e.g., cyberattack).

Whether you’re a small business owner or work for a large enterprise, business continuity planning will help you respond faster when disruption strikes and minimize the negative impact on your business.

Without a plan in place, you run the risk of being unable to continue selling  and shipping products during unplanned disruptions. Your ability to recover from these unplanned disruptions will be much slower and less effective — potentially impacting both your revenue and your brand reputation.

A business continuity plan is not a disaster recovery plan. Disaster recovery planning is part of a business continuity program, but the latter has a much broader scope.

Top Threats to Business Continuity

Depending on your particular business and level of risk, every brand will have different primary threats to business as usual. That’s why risk assessments prior to assembling a business continuity plan can be so helpful.

While you’ll need to have a plan in place for every possible outcome, the following threats are the most common business disruptors to watch.

1. Global pandemics.

Pandemics can throw a wrench in your business plans from all angles and directions. With citizens forced to stay home and do as much work from there as possible, to increased demand for certain items, and decreased supply due to  manufacturer shut-downs or disruptions across the supply chain.

One of the most important plans to put in place if you fear a global pandemic is how your people will communicate with each other and conduct necessary business offsite. It’s also important to have options when it comes to supply in case your supply chain  is disrupted.

2. Natural disasters.

A natural disaster refers to anything weather related — tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis, etc. — or other natural phenomena like earthquakes, wildfires, and volcanic eruptions. Some of these types of disasters are difficult to predict and can onset in seconds. They could cause grave damage to physical structures and anything inside, as well as disrupt supply chains through affected areas.

3. Utility outages.

A loss of power generation, communication lines, or water shutoffs can cause severe disruption to day-to-day operations, potentially damaging physical assets, and losing productivity and service.

4. Cybersecurity.

A cyberattack is any computer-based attack on a technical asset. Examples of cyberattacks include ransomware attacks, data theft , SQL injections, and distributed denial of service ( DDoS ) attacks. At best, your technical infrastructure will be at limited functionality until the issue is resolved. At worst, if you don’t have a data backup , you could potentially lose access to all your business data.

4 Characteristics Guiding Your Continuity Planning

You may be able to avoid some major disruptions, but there’s always room for the unexpected. That’s why you need a solid plan to restore your business after disaster strikes.

1. Comprehensive.

You may never be able to plan for every single possible disruption — or the combinations thereof — but it is worth trying. Don’t assume your first plan is going to work. You’ll need to make sure you have backup plans, and backup plans for your backup plans. Consider every single factor that could play a role, and assume that everything will go wrong at some point.

2. Realistic.

You don’t want to get into a disaster situation and find that your best laid plans actually cannot be carried out as planned. Be realistic about the plan you’ve laid out and make sure that it has as many contingency plans built in as possible.

3. Efficient.

Business is complex, so we won’t sit here and say your business continuity plan needs to be simple. But it needs to be able to be executed efficiently and with the resources you have at hand. The extra stress and expectations in a time of disaster or disruption can make even regular tasks more difficult to accomplish. Make sure this is accounted for in your plan.

4. Adaptable.

Nothing on paper could ever compare to the curveballs that nature or other unexpected forces may throw at us. Leave lots of room in your plan to adapt to the moment, as circumstances change — sometimes minute to minute. The plan should account for constant monitoring of the situation and provide a good foundation from which to pivot to addressing the issue at hand.

Benefits of Business Continuity Planning

Business continuity planning isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential to every business, and disruptions can be costly. We’re talking anything from a DDoS attack taking your site offline for an afternoon, to a warehouse fire resulting in mass loss of product, to a supply chain disruption that keeps your products from making their way to you in a timely manner.

Lacking a plan for initiating emergency response can lead to financial loss, loss of consumer (and team member) confidence, and impact your brand reputation. Here are some of the primary benefits of having a continuity plan in place.

1. Maintain business operations.

If you can keep your business operations running through a crisis, you can mitigate financial loss and send a message of stability to your team members and your customers. Having a strong partnership with your human resources function will be important here.  

2. Build customer confidence.

Your customers want to know that you can respond to anything, so they can keep expecting the service from your brand that they’re accustomed to. In disaster situations, consumers often look to their favorite brands to see how they’re reacting on the public stage and how they’re able to weather the internal storm.

3. Preserve your brand and reputation.

Large-scale disasters and disruptions are likely going to be media fodder, so it’s unlikely you’ll get a chance to follow your plan quietly. The world will be watching. Brands that seem prepared and able to rise to the occasion with strength, consistency, and grace will prove their resiliency to their consumers.

4. Protect your supply chain.

Supply chain is a great example of the maxim, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Supply chain disruptions are common because there are so many ways they could happen. A pandemic could shutter manufacturing facilities, for example. Or a natural disaster could cripple transportation in an important geographic area. A good plan will set out already-vetted options for circumventing  supply chain  issues.

5. Gain a competitive edge.

In cases where many businesses are affected by a disruption, your ability to get business moving again will go a long way in showing consumers that your brand is among the best. In disaster times, too, consumers watch brands closely to see how they’ll react. Quick but poised action will build trust in your brand, giving you an edge on your competitors.

6. Mitigate financial risk.

Knowing what to do quickly in case of a business disruption is an important piece of risk management. The longer the downtime, the more potential for financial loss. But with the right plans to pick up quickly and restore functionality where you need it most, you can keep your loss as minimal as possible.  

Creating Your Ecommerce Business Continuity Plan

Creating a business continuity plan is, admittedly, probably not the most fun day you’ll have at work. But it is a critical piece of running a resilient business, and it’s important that you, your business continuity team, and the rest of your staff take this seriously.

1. Identify objectives and goals of the plan.

Business continuity management extends beyond your information technology department and related IT systems — it applies broadly to all critical business functions, including human resources, operations, public relations, and more. At the highest level, the objective of creating a business continuity plan is to keep essential business processes running or minimize disruption.

But every business is different — so you’ll need to identify the goals and objectives most important to the way you operate. Those goals will guide your risk assessment, the business continuity planning process, and potential recovery strategies.

2. Establish an emergency preparedness team.

Select a few cross-functional managers or leaders, and anyone else you identify who may bring something valuable to the table. Make sure someone is designated as the leader to keep things moving forward and make decisions when necessary.

3. Perform a risk assessment and business impact analysis (BIA).

Here’s where you’ll identify the biggest potential threats to your business, then research and analyze them thoroughly. Discuss with the team what would happen if you have to reduce, modify, or eliminate essential services or functions. Be sure to document all the identified issues and related business impact.

4. Identify essential ecommerce business functions.

You’ll have to determine how your organization will maintain essential services/functions in the event of an emergency. Here are some of the essential services and functions that you’ll need to have a plan for.

Inventory management and supply continuity.

Think about what happens when you encounter a product shortage. Supply chain issues are common in disasters like major weather events or pandemics. During a disaster, will you have enough inventory? Do you have an inventory management tool or system to help manage inventory? Do you have a plan for times with low or no inventory ?

Order fulfillment and shipping deadlines.

If a crisis hits, can you still fill orders and meet shipping deadlines? It may be helpful to diversify shipping providers. If you use a 3PL , ask them about the steps they take toward business continuity to gauge whether they’ll be able to fulfill and ship in disaster conditions.

Ecommerce platform functionality.

If a crisis were to happen, can you adjust your ecommerce platform  to show out-of-stock items? Can you handle an influx of customers in a situation where supply is greatly increased? Do you have strong cybersecurity and all of your data backed up?

Maintaining customer service.

During a crisis, customers need transparency and empathy. You’ll need to provide a communications plan for your marketing/communications teams and your customer support team. You may need to bring on more personnel to answer customer questions.

5. Prepare a plan for each essential function/service.

Your ecommerce engine runs as a combination of parts, including:

Team members.

Suppliers/ subcontractors.

Each of these parts has to have its own plan. How will you address the situation with your customers? Does that  communication plan  change when it’s the kind of disruption that may have also put their lives in danger? (E.g., as we deal with pandemic conditions, our customers are dealing with that too — and we have to be empathetic as well as informative in every interaction.)

Will you be prepared to switch to another supplier to make sure you don’t run out of inventory? Do you know what your options are if your shipping partner experiences a disruption?

6. Review and make sure every business function has been addressed.

Leave no business function out of your plan, but that doesn’t mean that one doesn’t become more important as you look for ways to operate during disruption. You’ll want to make sure you’ve documented the following:

Level of business risk.

Impact on employees and customers, and how you’ll communicate with them.

Emergency policy creation.

Financial resources that can be tapped into in the event of a disaster.

External organization or community partners who can work together with you to be mutually beneficial.

7. Train staff, test, revise, and update the plan.

Present the plan to all your stakeholders, and suggest being proactive by performing trial runs — for a gut check that each part of the plan works as it should. This will help you identify any missing aspects or weaknesses. Then, once you’ve made any updates based on the feedback, begin to train all staff accordingly.

Nothing is ever certain. Maybe you’ll never encounter a major disruption to your business. But the chances are just as good — if not better — that you’ll have your fair share of challenges.

Being fully aware of your level of risk and what needs to be done to keep the business moving is where you want to start. That alone will give you a competitive edge and help mitigate any financial risk involved.

Then, creating your whole plan will help you rest easier at night. Once everyone in your business is fully comfortable with and trained on implementing this plan, you will have the peace of mind to know that if disaster strikes, not all will be lost.

Victoria Fryer avatar

Victoria is a content marketing writer, researcher, and content project manager at BigCommerce. Specializing in writing and web content strategy, she previously spent eight years in public relations and marketing for Tier I research universities. She holds a B.A. in English Writing and Rhetoric from St. Edward’s University and a Master of Liberal Arts from Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania.

How to Create a Business Continuity Plan in 2023

A BCP should be developed before a disaster occurs and should include input from all stakeholders. The goal is to protect assets and ensure that operations continue during and after a crisis. A BCP should:

  • Identify all risks, including how the risks will affect operations
  • Implement procedures and safeguards that will lessen the risks
  • Test to ensure the process works well
  • Review the process to make sure it is current

BCPs are an integral part of an organization’s risk management strategy. If your organization isn’t sure where to start, implementing a comprehensive business continuity and incident management platform such as Preparis Planner  can help alleviate the pain of getting started with a BCP.

Recommended Resources

The Ultimate Guide to Business Continuity Testing

The Ultimate Guide to Business Continuity Testing

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Risk Assessment Checklist

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Pandemic Tabletop Exercise by Preparis

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What Is Business Continuity?

What is business continuity

Business continuity is an organization's ability to maintain or quickly resume acceptable levels of product or service delivery following a short-term event that disrupts normal operations. Examples of disruptions range from natural disasters to power outages.

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Is business continuity the same as business resilience or disaster recovery?

Business continuity, disaster recovery, and business resilience are not the same, but they are related.

  • Business continuity is a process-driven approach to maintaining operations in the event of an unplanned disruption such as a cyber attack or natural disaster. Business continuity planning covers the entire business—processes, assets, workers, and more. It isn't focused solely on IT infrastructure and business systems.
  • Business resilience encompasses crisis management and business continuity. It requires a response to all types of risk that an organization may face. An organization that is business resilient is essentially in a constant state of "expecting the unexpected." It means continuously preparing to meet disruptions head-on, including events of extended duration that may affect more than one facility or region.
  • Disaster recovery focuses specifically on how to restore an enterprise's IT infrastructure and business systems following a disruption. It is considered an element of business continuity. A business continuity plan (BCP) might contain several disaster recovery plans, for example.

What is a business continuity strategy?

A business continuity strategy is a summary of the mitigation, crisis, and recovery plans to be implemented after a disruption to resume normal operations. "Business continuity strategy" is often used interchangeably with "business continuity plan." Both consider the broader goals, legal and regulatory requirements, personnel, and even the business's clients and partners.

What does a business continuity plan mitigate?

A relevant and well-tested BCP can help ease the negative impacts of an unexpected business disruption in many ways.

  • Financial impact: Disruptions to product supply chains and critical services to customers can directly affect sales and revenue. Downtime caused by unplanned disruptions can also result in higher costs for a business as it looks to repair operations and mitigate previously unidentified threats.
  • Reputation and brand impact: Failure to resume operations quickly and supply customers with the products or services they expect can prompt customer defections and tarnish the brand. Damage to reputation can in turn cause investors and capital sources to pull back funding, exacerbating the financial impact of a business disruption.
  • Regulatory impact: Customers and vendors are likely to complain when businesses fail to respond appropriately to disruptions, which may result in regulatory scrutiny or even censure. In highly-regulated industries, such as energy and financial services, business continuity planning is mandatory to ensure regulatory compliance.

Business continuity planning activities

A well-crafted and tested BCP can go a long way toward helping a business recover swiftly from a disruption. These are key steps a business may want to take.

Identifying critical business areas and functions

Business continuity planning begins with identifying an organization's key business areas and the critical functions within those areas. A business needs to determine and document the acceptable downtime for each area and function considered vital to operations. Then a plan to restore operations can be established, documented, and communicated.

Analyzing risks, threats, and potential impacts

Creating appropriate response scenarios requires knowing what disruptions the business could experience. An upfront analysis of risks and threats is necessary in order to prepare contingency responses to events. Organizations can also conduct a back-end analysis after an event to gather metrics and assess lessons learned. This information can drive improvements in how the business responds to disruptions.

Outlining and assigning responsibilities

A BCP details which personnel will be responsible for implementing specific aspects of the plan. It also identifies key decision-makers and a chain of command. The plan should include alternative options in case primary personnel are incapacitated or unavailable to respond to the disruption.

Defining and documenting alternatives

A business continuity plan should define and document alternative communication strategies in case telephone services or the internet are down. Enterprises should also have alternatives for mission-critical spaces such as data centers or manufacturing facilities in case buildings are damaged.

Assessing the need for critical backups

Essential equipment may be damaged or unavailable during a disruptive event. A business should consider whether it has access to backup equipment and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) during extended power outages. Business-critical data needs to be backed up regularly, and is mandatory in many regulated industries.

Testing, training, and communication

Business continuity plans need to be tested to ensure they will be effective. (Disaster recovery plans should be tested as well.) A best practice is to conduct a plan review at least quarterly with leadership and key team members who are responsible for executing the plan.

Many companies use role-playing sessions, simulations, and other types of exercises several times per year to test their BCPs. This approach helps to identify gaps, develop strategies for improvement, and determine if more resources are needed. Targeted staff training and communicating to the whole workforce the benefits of having a business continuity plan are also vital to its success.

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preparing a business continuity plan

Business Continuity Planning

A guide to create an effective bcp.

Ensuring that your business can keep going when unexpected events happen has always been important, but the events of the year 2020 have brought the need for sound business continuity to the fore. This article will help you to understand what business continuity is all about, provide guidance on creating a business continuity plan and model that’s right for you, give you advice on an appropriate strategy, and help you to maintain the continuity of your business whatever the world might throw at you in the future.

Disruption to any organization’s business can be very costly, and in today’s online consumer choice marketplace, it can even lead to you losing business to your competitors. Using business continuity techniques to prepare for and plan your reaction to disruptions can help you to significantly mitigate risks, reduce any harm, and in turn, improve the experience of your customers.

What is Business Continuity?

Your business can be disrupted at any time by circumstances that are outside your direct control. Business disruption can be a dramatic as a natural disaster or seemingly unimportant such as one of your employees getting sick. Other examples include your premises being flooded by a water leak, one of your suppliers going out of business, or a transport strike that stops your workers from getting into the office. Disruptions like this to your business can happen at any moment, with no warning, and are out of your direct control. Without any emergency preparedness, the implications of these disruptions to your business can be severe.

Business continuity is all about having a plan to deal with these situations so that your organization can continue to function with as little disruption as possible. What is business continuity in detail will be different for each organization, as each organization is different, but each will use the same business continuity principles. Whether you run a commercial business, a public sector organization, a charity, or any other type of organization, you need to understand what is business continuity to help you to keep operating in unforeseen circumstances.

Business continuity doesn’t happen all by itself. Sometimes you might get lucky and be able to carry on as usual after an emergency, but more often than not, your business will be disrupted unless you have created plans for how to keep it going. This might be a high-level business continuity plan that sets up a crisis management team and lets them make the decisions about what to do next. Or it could be a set of more detailed plans that direct the different parts of your business in what they should do next. But trying to keep going without any form of business continuity plan will risk your organization’s survival.

The cycle of events for maintaining business continuity is mostly the same, irrespective of the organization or event that leads to it. Every cycle starts with something untoward happening. This is what should happen next:

  • Someone realizes that the issue can’t be quickly resolved and escalates.
  • A crisis management team is set up.
  • The crisis management team assesses the information about the emergency.
  • They invoke the business continuity plan and potentially a disaster recovery plan in parallel if the solution is in their control.
  • Staff follow the instructions in the business continuity plan so that they can continue to work as normally as possible.
  • The crisis management team monitors the situation.
  • When possible, they issue the instruction to go back to normal working.
  • A review is held to identify what went well and what needs improving.

Table of Contents

The difference between disaster recovery and business continuity.

Many people get confused between what is business continuity and what is disaster recovery. They are not the same thing and have different goals, but there are relationships between them. Business Continuity is concerned with keeping all essential functions of an organization going when there is a significant disruption to any part of the organization, including IT systems, essential infrastructure, people, and premises.

Disaster recovery (DR) is usually only concerned with the IT and technology infrastructures that support critical business functions. DR is aimed at restoring these critical technology-based systems and services in an emergency after a major event stops them from working.  This often involves switching services from the primary site to an alternative location, then switching back again once the emergency is over. Disaster recovery is often considered to be a subset of business continuity.

Consider a holiday booking company that takes orders both online and over the telephone. Both rely on IT systems hosted on the company’s premises. Disaster recovery preparations could include having back-up IT systems in another location, with the data backed up to it several times a day. If the primary IT systems fail, then users could rely on back-up systems.  Business continuity arrangements would, of course, include this but also extend to non-IT issues. For example, making preparations for staff to work from home if they were unable to get into the office for any reason.

What is a business continuity plan (BCP)?

A business continuity plan, often abbreviated to BCP, is a plan that outlines the actions to be taken when one or more defined events disrupt normal business operations.  Having a plan will help you to ensure business continuity. Business continuity planning is the process that helps you to create your BCP, designing a system for prevention and recovery from potential threats to an organization.

Having a well-designed business continuity plan will ensure that your staff and assets are able to get back to operation safely and quickly following a disaster. A BCP should be created using input from key staff and stakeholders, and should be regularly reviewed and updated, particularly if circumstances change. The plan should consider all risks that could materially affect operations, both internal and external. Hence business continuity planning is a key element of any organizations risk management strategy.

business continuity plan - business man looking ahead

  • How each risk could affect operations if it materialized.
  • What can be done to either fully mitigate each risk or reduce its impact.
  • How the plan will be tested.
  • Who is responsible for business continuity planning?

Every business, irrespective of its size, should have a BCP.  Disruption to normal operations will lead to loss of revenue and higher costs, contributing to reduced profitability.  Relying on insurance policies alone will not cover the costs of trying to win back the business that you have lost.

The complexity of the BCP will vary according to the size of the organization, how it is structured, the nature of its business, the risks to continuity, and any external regulatory requirements. The aim should be to create a BCP that is in enough detail to be easily followed but not so complex that it is difficult to understand.

What is the goal of BCP?

In order to keep the correct focus, it is important to understand what is the primary goal of business continuity planning. It is easy to get side-tracked and think that having a BCP is the primary goal. It isn’t. The purpose of your business continuity plan is to enable your business to continue in operation in as many circumstances as possible. That must be the primary goal of BCP for every organization.  The only reason why BCP is required is to keep your company operating. Your BCP strategy must ensure that this is the case.

There are a number of lower-level goals that can help you to understand what is the purpose of a business continuity plan, including:

Business Continuity Plan - Team looking at BCP

  • Minimize negative impacts on the organization, its operations, and its performance. One of the most significant benefits of having a business continuity plan is that it can minimize damage to the organization during disruptive changes, as well as during external events.
  • Assign roles, responsibilities, and tasks. Who is responsible for what will vary between organizations, but roles and responsibilities for all business continuity planning and execution activities must be clearly defined and communicated. This should include responsible for BCP operations covering who can invoke the plan and who will manage the execution.
  • Define how the plan will be communicated. Just having a plan isn’t enough. It is unlikely that you will maintain continuity for your business unless all staff are aware of its existence, its content, and what their roles and responsibilities are when the plan is executed.
  • Define how the plan will be tested. Every plan should be tested, as it’s only then that you will discover what doesn’t work. Testing a business continuity plan will need to use simulations, not real disasters, but your plan should define up-front how testing will be done.
  • Maintain continuity: This is an obvious goal for every plan that defines the actions that should be taken to maintain the continuity of the business for a number of different scenarios once the plan has been invoked.
  • Restore normal operations . This goal addresses a missing element in many business continuity plans. There will be a point when the business can return to its regular operating model. How this is done should be defined in the BCP.

How does a BCP help mitigate risk?

Creating a good BCP needs investment in time and money. A big part of justifying the value of business continuity planning is understanding how a BCP helps mitigate risk.

Every business faces risks to its continuing existence. While some of these may be unique to each organization, many of them are common. These include:

  • Natural disasters
  • Terrorist incidents
  • Failure of a supplier
  • Cyberattacks
  • Power blackouts
  • Data breaches
  • Staff availability

The process of creating a business continuity plan forces you to consider all these types of risk in the context of your own business operations. That includes assessing the likely impact and the probability of the risk actually materializing. For example, if your premises are on the top of a mountain, then the likelihood of flooding may be very low! This is why trying to adopt a business continuity plan from another organization without reviewing and updating it for your own circumstances isn’t a good approach. At a high level, it can provide a useful BCP plan checklist to act as a guide for your own business continuity requirements, but you need to do the thinking at a detailed level.

There’s an old saying that goes something like ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.’ The activities necessary to create a BCP make you think about what those challenges are for you, then think about how you could deal with them.  That leaves you significantly better prepared when one of them jumps out at you. That will always help you to maintain business continuity.

As you work through the detail of each possible risk, it’s possible that you will identify actions you can take to mitigate against the risk fully. For example, if you operate a data center, your business continuity planning will identify a risk of total power supply failure. Depending on the likelihood and the cost of alternatives, you might decide to fully mitigate against this risk by investing in generators and fuel supplies. Many commercial data centers have taken this approach, even going to the level of paying fuel suppliers a premium to ensure that they get priority for fuel deliveries if there are fuel shortages. This is an excellent example of where BCP activities have considered every risk in detail.  

When you can’t fully mitigate against a risk, then there is a chance that it might materialize. The process for BCP makes you think about what you could do to maintain the continuity of your business if this happens, at worst reducing the impact but at best reducing it to zero.  In reality, this is just good risk management, but a business continuity model will give you a good structure and approach for identifying and then managing the risks.

How to write a business continuity plan

In this section, we will try to answer the question of what does a business continuity plan look like and what should a business continuity plan include, by providing you with a BCP plan outline setting out the elements of a business continuity plan. The detail of what goes into each section will, of course, depend on your own organization and its particular risks, but it should help you to learn how to write a simple business continuity plan.

Components of BCP

Developing a business continuity plan is a vital activity for any organization. Any BCP implementation is not trivial. Preparing a BCP is not an academic exercise just to tick a box in an auditors report or complete a BCP plan checklist. What should a BCP contain in detail will be different for each organization, but the structure can be very similar. This section provides an illustration of the structure for a typical BCP Plan should contain.

These typical components of a business continuity plan aren’t meant to be prescriptive, but following this outline will help you create your first high level business continuity plan that you can then develop and elaborate to suit your own circumstances.  An organization can have a single plan that covers all functions, or a hierarchy of plans within an overall business continuity model, with each function having its own BCP.  This approach helps to avoid an overly large plan that is difficult to follow, but it is a good idea that each individual plan follows the same general structure.

BCP - moving pieces on board

  • Version history – who signed off which version when.
  • Purpose of the plan – for example, ‘To provide a flexible response so that XYZ Corporation can respond to a disruptive incident, maintain delivery of critical services during an incident, and return to business as usual.’
  • Plan scope – which parts of the business, activities, and locations are covered by the plan.
  • Plan owner – who is responsible for maintaining the plan.
  • Review cycle – how often will the plan be reviewed.
  • Test history – When was the plan tested, and what were the outcomes?
  • Associated documents – links to any other documents that support the business continuity plan.
  • Circumstances – A list of all of the identified events that would lead to starting the BCP process. E.g., loss of key staff, loss of critical systems, denial of access to facilities, loss of a key resource such as a supplier.
  • Responsibility for activation– Who can invoke execution of the business continuity actions. In small organizations, this is often a single person in a senior role. A common approach in large organizations is to create a business continuity team with senior representatives from key functions.  When alerted to the situation, the team get together and decide whether to invoke the BCP or wait for more information.

Process Activation

  • Protect the safety of staff, visitors, and the wider community.
  • Protect vital assets, e.g., equipment, data, reputation, etc.
  • Ensure necessary communication takes place.
  • Support the Business Continuity phase.
  • Support the Recovery and Resumption phase.

This section is an essential requirement for BCP implementation, as it lists the actions that should be taken in enough detail so that they can be followed if the BCP is invoked. Determining which actions are needed is a key part of developing a business continuity plan. These and all other actions in a BCP are usually set out in a table to aid understanding. E.g.

Different tables should be provided, listing the appropriate actions and responsibilities for:

  • Protecting the welfare of staff, visitors, and the public.
  • Communications, covering who needs to be informed that the business continuity plan has been activated.
  • Actions to support business continuity, including recovering any vital equipment.
  • Actions to support recovery and resumption of normal business activities.
  • Communicating with staff.

The actions that the business continuity team should take are listed in this section of the BCP. The actions include:

  • Identifying which staff need to be involved in executing the BCP Plan.
  • Evaluating the impact of the events on business continuity.
  • Recording all decisions, actions, and spend.
  • BCP section 5: Recovery and resumption. This part of the BCP Plan lists the actions that should be taken to resume regular working practices. If the impact of the events leading to the invocation of the business continuity plan is prolonged, this might involve delivering services from new locations such as working from home or alternative premises. Here is an example of the actions in this section:

Steps involved in creating Business Contintuity Plan

This section should help you to understand how to create a business continuity plan. It is a good idea to use a structured approach to create a BCP. A typical BCP process flow will follow these BCP planning steps:

  • Identify different types of disruptive events . The types of event should include natural disasters, power outages, cyber-attacks, civil disturbances, transport failures, denial of access to premises, and supply chain disruptions. Any of these could cause an emergency, either singly or in combination. For example, widespread flooding could damage essential equipment, cause a power outage, and prevent staff from getting into work.

Business Meeting

  • Assess the impact of each type of event against critical business activities. Completing a  business impact analysis will project the potential effects of disruptions, assessing risks, and potential losses. The analysis will provide important information that can be used to develop prevention, mitigation, and recovery strategies. They should be as in-depth as is reasonably possible, covering a variety of potential scenarios, timing, duration, and other relevant variables.
  • Design recovery strategies . One of the biggest benefits of having a business continuity plan is that it can minimize damage to the organization during a disruption. Though it is not always possible to prevent certain types of events from affecting the business, there are often ways to reduce negative impacts. In certain situations, business continuity efforts can even mean the difference between failure and survival. Approaches should be developed to protect the most critical business functions and restore lost functionality as soon as possible. It is vital for organizations to protect these critical business functions during a disruption so that the crucial business operations can continue. Recovery strategies for business continuity can include relocating operations, outsourcing lost business functions, and hiring in replacement equipment. For example, initiating  remote working policies can allow businesses to stay functional when employees cannot work on-site, as organizations discovered during the COVID-19 crisis.

BCP Document

  • Test the plan. Testing is a vital part of any business continuity strategy. As soon as you create your plan, you must test it. Only by doing that comprehensively and diligently can you prove whether your BCP is going to work or not. Far too many organizations don’t do this and only realize that their plan doesn’t work as expected when they have to execute it for real. Testing will help you to find any parts of the plan that need to be changed or improved.
  • Develop and conduct training and education .  Just having a tested plan isn’t enough. Everyone in the organization needs to know that the business continuity plan exists, why it is needed, and what are their own roles and responsibilities. Employees should become familiar with a plan before it is ever needed.  Providing pre-emptive training  can ensure that employees stay prepared and can perform their duties effectively when the plan is invoked.
  • Execute the plan . Instead of waiting for a real disaster to happen, it is a good idea to execute the plan using a simulated emergency. This should be done with as few people as possible, knowing in advance that it isn’t a real emergency. This approach to testing business continuity will give you the best guarantee of success, as it will highlight any areas of improvement. Ideally, this will be regularly re-run using different scenarios that will test different parts of the BCP plan.

BCP Implementation

Business continuity plan project management.

Implementing any BCP is a project, so you should follow a project management methodology, using a project team that includes all parts of the business. Business continuity can be implemented solely using internal staff, particularly if you have individuals with the necessary skills and experience.  In a large organization, a BCP plan will be prepared by someone that has a role dedicated to business continuity. In smaller organizations, the task can be assigned to another role, but preparing the plan is not an administration task. It requires knowledge of what a BCP Plan should contain and the BCP process flow, strong risk management skills, and a good understanding of who business continuity planning is done for: the whole organization.  However, many organizations bring in external companies that specialize in business continuity management (BCM).

BCP roles and responsibilities

One of the key activities for any BCP implementation is the definition of roles and responsibilities, both for the implementation itself but also for BCP execution, maintenance, and improvement. Business continuity approaches are often led by a dedicated individual or team. The BCP team’s composition will vary, depending on the nature of the disruption, and each team member will be assigned specific duties.

BCP training

Defining and executing training activities and exercises is a key part of any BCP implementation. Training will ensure that employees are prepared so that they can perform their tasks effectively and operate efficiently during an invocation of the business continuity plan. Without this training, employees will not be able to react effectively or swiftly – precisely when speed is of the utmost importance.

Management support

It is imperative to get genuine management support for the business continuity plan. Far too often, the plans are created to satisfy a governance requirement, but in reality, the management doesn’t really care about business continuity or disaster recovery plan. They care more about profit, business strategy, client satisfaction, and market share. One approach to get management support is to educate them on the need for business continuity and how important it is for continued business operations. Using examples from other organizations is a good way to help.

The bottom line

Creating an efficient business continuity plan is extremely crucial for every company. Despite this, some organizations still underestimate the need for one, believing that nothing bad can happen to them. This is illogical if you consider the number and wide range of potential threats to any business.

Creating a BCP is not an administrative task. It requires considerable thought and effort by a lot of people. Using a robust approach to BCP implementation that has full management support is vital for success.

Any plan is only as good as its testing, so ensure that you test your BCP plan as soon as you create it, then improve and repeat regularly. Doing this will help ensure that your organization can continue to operate in the face of disruptions, helping you build trust and reputation with your customers.

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A step-by-step guide to writing a business continuity plan for your business.

In an article aimed at providing assistance to those starting out in business continuity, CMAC overviews the basics of business continuity and offers a useful framework for writing your first business continuity plan.

What is a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan is a written document that describes the emergency procedures that should happen if a business-critical process fails.

Several sources can threaten businesses. Sometimes, disruption can take the form of  Force Majeure  circumstances, like extreme weather or political unrest. Other circumstances are less obvious, but just as disruptive: supply chain issues, web server downtime or power outages can leave permanent damage to a business’s finances after a certain amount of time.

Businesses must prevent unwanted downtime to ensure critical functions and services aren’t affected. The best way to ensure a consistent and effective response to potential issues is to implement a robust, documented business continuity plan.

What is the purpose of a business continuity plan?

A strategically structured and rehearsed business continuity plan provides a number of benefits to both employees and the company itself.

With improvements to communication, technology and resilience, here are a number of examples of the positives that you can expect from a business continuity plan:

Helps your business to survive a disruptive event  - Ensuring you have a robust plan in place will enable your business to recover in the shortest possible timeframe from an incident.

Protect your organization’s reputation and brand  - Whether it’s in the eyes of the public, suppliers and/or clients you work with, showing that you can respond well to the unexpected will instil confidence in your business and help to mitigate any negative feelings due to disruptions.

Strengthen your relationship with third parties and subsidiaries  - With an effective business continuity plan, you’ll demonstrate that your company is being run well from the top down. By showing that you’re a reliable partner that can be depended on, you’ll attract new business and solidify your relationship with current clients and service providers.

Ensure staff safety  - The well-being of your employees is a natural factor in a business continuity plan. By ensuring your team is looked after and knows what the procedure is during disruptions, you can establish clear roles and responsibilities to keep everyone under your care safe in an emergency.

Meet regulatory standards  - Globally, there are corporate governance regulations that require directors and key stakeholders to exercise reasonable care, skill and diligence to mitigate risks facing an organization. With an effective business continuity plan in place, you can ensure you’re meeting the requirements of a growing body of legislation.

What does a good business continuity plan look like?

The three key elements of a business continuity plan are resilience, recovery, and contingency:

1. Resilience

Businesses can increase their resilience by designing critical functions and infrastructures to protect against specific scenarios. Examples include; data redundancy, staffing rotations and maintaining a surplus of capacity. If implemented efficiently, resilience in business continuity can even keep essential services running on-site or remotely without interruption to daily operations.

2. Recovery

There’s no way an organization can prepare for every eventuality. But with rapid recovery, you can future-proof your business by ensuring you have strategies in place to restore business functions in an emergency. With recovery time objectives for different systems, you can analyse and prioritise which needs recovering first.

3. Contingency

A contingency plan ensures that an organization has procedures in place to distribute and delegate responsibilities for a range of external scenarios. These can include replacing hardware, sourcing an emergency workspace and contracting third-party vendors for assistance.

Who is responsible for a business continuity plan?

To ensure your organization’s readiness, it’s important to designate who will be responsible for implementing and managing your business continuity plan. For small businesses, a single individual could be tasked with writing a business continuity plan. Or for larger organizations, a whole team could be involved with developing a business continuity plan.

In such cases, business unit leaders - such as payroll, corporate travel, human resources and security - will be given the responsibility of creating their respective unit’s business continuity plan with a program manager overseeing the process.

It is essential to make sure each person understanding their responsibilities and that there are clear lines of communication between employees and external stakeholders, in order to keep everything as smooth as possible during an disruptive scenario.

What is the first step in writing a business continuity plan?

The first step you should take when preparing to write a business continuity plan is to conduct a full Business Impact Assessment (BIA).

A BIA predicts the consequences of a significant disruption to your business processes. It clarifies the potential losses that could be incurred in each circumstance.

A BIA should include the following:

Potential losses  - What would your lost sales and income look like for each hour of downtime, or each day?

Delayed sales  - Could disruption create cash flow issues for you by delaying your sales or income? If so, to what extent? What lines of credit would you have to rely on?

Increased expenses  - How much would you have to spend on resources to mitigate the issue? Think about things like overtime, outsourcing, and costs associated with expediting business-critical activities.

Regulatory fines  - How much could you be fined by regulators for breaches to things like data privacy or health and safety?

Contractual penalties  - Are there any charges you could incur for failing to meet SLAs with your business partners?

Customer satisfaction  -  How much damage to your public reputation could a disruption have? You can quantify by thinking of the number of additional negative reviews you could receive for each day of delays.

Delay of new business plans  - Would you need to push back any planned launches or new business agreements while you deal with disruptions?

Writing your plan: a step-by-step framework

Identify your business-critical processes  - Critical business processes are those necessary for the survival of the company in the case of loss of revenue, customer service interruption or reputation damage. E.g. Manufacturing - what you would need to keep your production line going. Finance — how to recover important documents that contain sensitive information. IT - is home working feasible for your business?

Specify the target recovery time for these processes  - How long would it take for the loss of a business-critical process to do irreparable damage to your business? Your target recovery time for each process you identified should be within this window. Determine how long you could tolerate a disruption: this is known as a recovery time objective (RTO). Your business continuity plan should enable you to mitigate disruptions within this time window.

Define the specific resources needed for each process  - Once you’ve identified how long you’ll need to restore a process, you’ll need to outline everything you’ll need to do so, and plan within that time frame. You could split this into internal resources (key people in your organization, passwords, office space, specialist equipment) and external resources (e.g. supplies, transportation). Along with identifying how readily available they can be, and for how long you’ll need them.

Describe the steps needed to restore each process  - If your business is disrupted by an IT failure, fire, flood or an extreme weather event, what is your plan to address this? Devise a backup plan for each key operation you have, detailing who to contact, what resources you’ll need, and how much you might need to spend in order to restore each process.

Decide on a schedule to update the information  - Once you’ve compiled the above four points, you’ll have a strong business continuity plan that you can action. But it won’t be bulletproof forever. As your business evolves, so will the technology it uses and the relationships it has. Therefore, you need to plan ways to keep the information up-to-date. It might be that you decide on a regular date that the whole plan needs to be revisited, whether that’s yearly, quarterly or even monthly. Alternatively, you might decide it’s better to update small elements of the plan as and when they change: e.g. if a password to a critical folder is changed, there’s someone in your organization who is responsible for updating your business continuity plan accordingly.

What are the four P’s of business continuity planning?

The four P’s of business continuity are people, processes, premises, and providers:

  • People  - This covers your staff, customers and clients.
  • Processes  - This includes the technology and strategies your business uses to keep everything running.
  • Premises  - Covers the buildings and spaces from which your business operates.
  • Providers  - This includes parties that your business relies on for getting resources, like your suppliers and partners.

You can use the four P’s when reviewing the initial draft of your business continuity plan to ensure you’ve considered the impact on each of them at every stage.

For example, how might your plan to recover important documents out of working hours impact your staff? How hard would it be to access the premises? When should you notify your clients and business partners?

What is the most important part of a business continuity plan?

Every element of your business continuity plan is important, but perhaps the most critical part to get right is how you plan to respond to potential issues. It’s advantageous to have precise calculations about potential losses and the impact of your business relationships, but without a clear and effective way of reacting to disruptions, your business will incur serious - and sometimes irreparable - financial damage.

Business continuity plan template

The following example business continuity plan template will help you get started:

1. Objective of the plan

Open with a short summary of the ‘why’ behind the how. Explain clearly and succinctly that the aim of your business continuity plan is to protect your business in the event of a disruption to business-critical processes.

2. Business-critical processes checklist

Your plan will need to contain a list of its most important processes. Below are a few examples:

3. Recovery plan

For each critical function you listed in step 2, you’ll need to specify a comprehensive, tailored recovery plan that should be followed in order to get the process back up and running within your RTO. For example:

4. Contact list

Create lists of staff, suppliers and insurers that should be contacted in case of an emergency.

List of key staff: example

Supplier list: example

List of insurers: example

About the author

CMAC specialises in providing emergency assistance to businesses experiencing transport disruptions to keep things running smoothly and minimise potential losses.  Learn more about CMAC’s full suite of industry-leading recovery solutions , from ground transport to emergency accommodation.

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IMAGES

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  2. Business Continuity Plan in Times of Crisis

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  3. How to create an effective business continuity plan?

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  4. Building a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

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  3. BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN

  4. Business Continuity Plan Part IV

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COMMENTS

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    Step 1: Establish an emergency preparedness team. Assign a team the responsibility for emergency preparedness. Select a few managers or an existing committee to take charge of the project. It's advisable to assign one person to lead the planning process.

  3. How to prepare a business continuity plan

    The first step when preparing a BCP is identifying who needs to lead, create, and execute it. It's best when the effort can be spearheaded from the top, such as at the board or executive level. Leadership buy-in sends a strong message throughout the organization that business continuity is a top priority. While the C-suite puts its support ...

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  6. How to Write a Business Continuity Plan

    Here is an example of a BCP format: Business Name: Record the business name, which usually appears on the title page. Date: The day the BCP is completed and signed off. Purpose and Scope: This section describes the reason for and span of the plan. Business Impact Analysis: Add the results of the BIA to your plan.

  7. How To Develop A Business Continuity Plan

    1. Create a checklist. Think thoroughly about what you want to be included in your BCP, and start to compile all the necessary pieces in a checklist. Be sure to include things like critical ...

  8. What Is a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), and How Does It Work?

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  9. How to create an effective business continuity plan

    A business continuity plan outlines procedures and instructions an organization must follow in the face of disaster, whether fire, flood, or cyberattack. ... Testing and practicing help prepare ...

  10. How to craft an effective business continuity plan

    Get the word out. Iterate and improve. 1. Analyze your company. In this phase you conduct an analysis to identify critical activities, determine which activities must continue, which can be temporarily paused, and which can operate at a reduced capacity. You then assess the financial impact of disruptions.

  11. Business Continuity Plan: Example & How to Write

    Step 3: Establish the business continuity plan objectives. Step 4: Evaluate the potential impact of disruptions to the business and its workers. Step 5: List actions to protect the business. Step 6: Organize contact lists. Step 7: Maintain, review, and continuously update the business continuity plan.

  12. Understanding the Essentials of a Business Continuity Plan

    A business continuity plan is a document that outlines how a company can keep running during a crisis. It covers everything from backup systems, communication channels, emergency contacts, and recovery strategies. A good business continuity plan can help you avoid downtime, minimize losses, and protect your reputation. In this blog post, we'll show you how to create a business continuity ...

  13. A step-by-Step Guide to Writing an Effective Business Continuity Plan

    We've prepared an example business continuity plan to get you started. 1. Objective of the plan. Open with a short summary of the 'why' behind the how. Explain clearly and succinctly that the aim of your business continuity plan is to protect your business in the event of a disruption to business-critical processes. 2.

  14. A 5-Step Guide to create a Business Continuity Plan

    Step 1: Form a Business Continuity Team. Before you get started, it is essential to have the right team to create and implement a business continuity plan in your organization. A business continuity team can be split into two sub-functions: The Command Center team: This team consists of the incident response team, crisis, and recovery ...

  15. 7 Steps For Creating a Business Continuity Plan

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  16. 10 Key Steps for Crafting a Robust Business Continuity Plan

    5. Data Backup and Recovery. Data is often a company's most valuable asset in the digital age. Implement a robust data backup and recovery strategy to safeguard critical information. Regularly back up data to secure off-site locations and test the recovery process to ensure it works seamlessly when needed. 6.

  17. How to Create a Business Continuity Plan in 2023

    A BCP should be developed before a disaster occurs and should include input from all stakeholders. The goal is to protect assets and ensure that operations continue during and after a crisis. A BCP should: Identify all risks, including how the risks will affect operations. Implement procedures and safeguards that will lessen the risks.

  18. What Is Business Continuity?

    A business continuity strategy is a summary of the mitigation, crisis, and recovery plans to be implemented after a disruption to resume normal operations. "Business continuity strategy" is often used interchangeably with "business continuity plan." Both consider the broader goals, legal and regulatory requirements, personnel, and even the ...

  19. 5 Essential Steps to Business Continuity Planning

    Step 3: Understand the Risks to Your Company. Once your business continuity management team is assembled, you must conduct a business impact analysis (BIA). This type of analysis will help you identify specific threats to financial performance, operations, supply chains, reputation, employees.

  20. Business Continuity Planning

    The BCP describes the sequence of actions to take in the event of a disruption or emergency, including the communication protocols and the responsibilities for executing the plan. Test the plan. Testing is a vital part of any business continuity strategy. As soon as you create your plan, you must test it.

  21. A step-by-step guide to writing a business continuity plan for your

    Open with a short summary of the 'why' behind the how. Explain clearly and succinctly that the aim of your business continuity plan is to protect your business in the event of a disruption to business-critical processes. 2. Business-critical processes checklist. Your plan will need to contain a list of its most important processes.

  22. PDF Guide to using the business continuity plan template

    Preparing your business continuity plan. This is a guide to assist you to prepare your business . continuity plan using our . template. Introduction. Many small businesses struggle to carry out 'business . as usual' in the face of unexpected disruption. Developing a business continuity plan helps your business continue to operate through ...

  23. Preparing for Crisis: How to Create Business Continuity Plan

    A business continuity plan is about ensuring your business continues to operate and potentially even grow in times of high distress. This article will cover how you can start your own business continuity planning to ensure the best possible outcome for yourself and your employees. In 2019, 25 percent of companies worldwide reported the average hourly downtime cost of their servers to range ...