Business Continuity Planning

Develop and maintain business continuity capabilities including Business Impact Analysis, communication plans, recovery procedures, and testing schedules for organizational resilience.

When to Use

• Developing a formal Business Continuity Plan (BCP) for the organization
• Conducting a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to prioritize recovery efforts
• Establishing communication plans for crisis scenarios
• Defining recovery procedures for critical business processes
• Scheduling and conducting BCP exercises and tests
• Meeting compliance requirements for continuity planning (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP)

BCP Framework

The example downtime bands, response times and exercise cadence are illustrative, not universal compliance obligations. Have process owners approve maximum tolerable disruption, RTO (restoration target) and RPO (tolerable data-loss interval) based on actual impacts/dependencies; RTO must fit within tolerable disruption. Plan clean restore, reconciliation and failback evidence. Real failover, isolation, contact notifications and drills require explicit scope, change approval, rollback/abort criteria and communications marked as exercise. A document/tabletop alone does not prove recovery capability. Protect contact lists and accessible offline copies without exposing personal data.