Business Continuity
What is a business continuity plan?
A business continuity plan keeps your business operating through a disruption and recovers it fast. Here is what goes into one, how it differs from disaster recovery, and how to start with a business impact analysis.
A business continuity plan is a documented strategy that keeps your business operating through a disruption, a cyberattack, an outage, a fire, or a natural disaster, and gets it back to normal fast. It identifies the functions you cannot run without, the risks to them, and exactly who does what when something goes wrong.
What goes into a business continuity plan?
A good plan covers a few essentials: the critical business functions you cannot operate without, the people and systems each one depends on, the risks that could take them down, and step-by-step recovery procedures with names attached. It also sets recovery targets, how fast each function must be back, so everyone knows what good looks like before the pressure is on.
Business continuity vs disaster recovery: what is the difference?
Business continuity is the broad plan to keep the whole business running. Disaster recovery is the IT-specific piece that restores your systems and data. Continuity answers what the business does when the office is unusable; disaster recovery answers how the servers and data come back. You need both, and the IT side is where bdManagedIT focuses.
Start with a business impact analysis
The foundation of any continuity plan is a business impact analysis, a simple exercise that ranks your functions by how much a disruption would cost and how quickly each must recover. Working out what an hour of downtime costs your business makes the priorities obvious and keeps the plan focused on what actually matters.
How often should you test and update the plan?
A plan you have never tested is a guess. Test it at least once a year and after any major change to your people, systems, or risks, then fix what the test exposes. NIST's contingency planning guidance recommends regular testing and maintenance for exactly this reason: plans that sit untouched quietly stop matching reality.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a business continuity plan?
- A business continuity plan is a documented strategy for keeping your business operating during and after a disruption such as a cyberattack, outage, or disaster. It lists your critical functions, the risks to them, and the step-by-step actions and people needed to recover.
- What is the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery?
- Business continuity is the whole-business plan to keep operating through a disruption. Disaster recovery is the IT-focused part that restores systems and data. Continuity is the strategy; disaster recovery is how the technology comes back. Most businesses need both.
- What is a business impact analysis?
- A business impact analysis ranks your business functions by how much a disruption would cost and how fast each must recover. It is the foundation of a continuity plan, because it tells you what to protect and restore first instead of treating everything as equally urgent.
- How often should a business continuity plan be tested?
- At least once a year, and after any major change to your team, systems, or risks. A plan that is never tested tends to fail when it is finally needed, because people, contacts, and systems drift out of date. Tabletop exercises are a low-cost way to test.
- Can bdManagedIT help build our continuity and recovery plan?
- Yes. We focus on the IT side: setting recovery targets, replicating and protecting your critical systems, and testing the failover, so the technology part of your continuity plan actually works. We deliver it as managed business continuity and disaster recovery.
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