Most organizations today operate in a dynamic risk environment, where their resilience and ability to maintain revenue depends on how well-prepared they are to handle business disruptions.
For instance, cybersecurity incidents and vendor-related operational disruptions can occur despite your best efforts to predict and prevent them. When they do, you need a proactive strategy in place to ensure your business can resume its operations efficiently. By integrating an elaborate business continuity plan (BCP) within your operations, you can minimize revenue loss as well as safeguard your organization’s reputation.
In this guide, we will help you prepare an actionable BCP that can effectively bridge the gap between risks and recovery. You’ll learn about:
- Key components of a BCP
- Benefits of business continuity planning
- Five steps for developing a comprehensive business continuity plan
What is a business continuity plan?
A business continuity plan defines procedures to maintain critical operations during adverse events. It offers clear guidelines to protect critical assets, adapt to recovery workflows, and ensure your organization continues delivering value to stakeholders during disruptions.
While a BCP is primarily focused on remediation, it also has a preventative component. It aims to predict, prevent, and minimize the impact of disaster events through relevant risk mitigation plans and operational protocols.
Business continuity planning is a critical component of any organization’s risk management strategy that should ideally be done during the early stages of business. Your BCP should cover all threats with a high likelihood of occurrence and/or a considerable impact on your primary operations, as well as be tested and revised regularly to account for new risks and vulnerabilities.
{{cta_withimage8="/cta-modules"}} | GRC implementation guide
Why you need a business continuity plan
From a return-on-investment (ROI) perspective, the primary benefits of a BCP include revenue protection and demonstrable operational predictability. It shows stakeholders, including investors, partners, and customers, your preparedness to execute operations during a crisis, which enhances customer trust and brand credibility in the long run.
Other notable advantages of a well-developed business continuity plan include:
- Readiness for regulatory compliance: Many regulations and standards (such as the ISO 27001) require swift incident responses and other actions to ensure business continuity, so developing a robust BCP helps you stay compliant.
- Lower downtime: Business continuity planning is particularly important for SaaS organizations because it prevents expensive downtimes that can make customers switch to a more stable alternative. According to a Ponemon Institute study, the average cost of an unplanned downtime can be nearly $9,000 per minute.
- Cost savings: Besides reducing downtime costs, a business continuity plan can help you cut costs by:
- Lowering cyber insurance premiums
- Reducing last-minute operational recovery expenses
- Preventing expenses related to data loss
- Avoiding regulatory penalties (if applicable)
- Improved business sustainability: A fully implemented BCP requires the adoption of controls and safeguards that not only fortify your security posture but also keep your operations competitive, even during challenging times.
- Visible accountability: A BCP improves accountability during disruptive events by assigning roles and responsibilities for recovery tasks and establishing communication protocols for transparency.
What does a business continuity plan include?
While the specific components of a business continuity plan can vary, some universal elements include:
- Risk assessment results: Your business continuity plan should highlight scoped risks prioritized according to their likelihood and impact
- Reporting guidelines: You should define a clear chain of command and reporting framework that defines how business continuity events and incidents will be reported
- Recovery procedures: For each identified threat, you should develop a clear set of policies and processes to follow in case of a realized risk event
- Testing procedures: You’ll outline training programs, including drills and simulations, that help your organization get familiar with the BCP
- Supporting resources: If applicable, the BCP should lead you to resources like emergency vendor lists and floor plans
Other elements of your business continuity plan will largely depend on the threats specific to you. For example, if your organization has a greater risk of natural disasters like hurricanes, you should include a relevant disaster recovery plan outlining aspects like alternate work sites, infrastructure and evaluation plans.
It’s worth noting that a disaster recovery plan typically has a narrow scope and focuses primarily on catastrophic events (large power outages, natural disasters, etc.). By contrast, a business continuity plan has a broader scope of threats, covering:
- All cybersecurity concerns, from phishing emails to data breaches
- Third-party risks
- Supply chain disruptions (e.g., transportation blocks or regulatory disruption)
{{cta_webinar1="/cta-modules"}} | Webinar: Scaling your GRC program with automation and AI
5 steps to set up a business continuity plan
Here’s a standard five-step process to help you develop an effective business continuity plan:
- Perform a comprehensive risk assessment and impact analysis
- Define your recovery objectives and measures
- Draft the business continuity plan—consider using a template
- Test your plan
- Conduct employee training
The more granular activities within each step are explained below.
Step 1: Perform a comprehensive risk assessment and impact analysis
The first step is to fully understand your risk profile and security posture. You’ll conduct a comprehensive risk assessment that lets you identify the potential likelihood and impact of mapped threats and highlight critical ones.
You may want to start by analyzing your critical business functions to identify the most disruptive vulnerabilities and the risks they pose to your organization. Then, conduct an impact assessment to determine how different threats could affect your operations.
Additionally, you can use various risk assessment methodologies to identify the risks that impact you. For example, quantitative analysis is a good option for threats you can assign numerical values to (e.g., the number of users impacted by a data breach). A qualitative analysis, on the other hand, requires brainstorming and discussions with experts to pinpoint the likelihood and impact of risks.
Risk assessment for business continuity planning involves extensive workflows, including activities such as:
- Identifying and assessing vulnerability impacts
- Maintaining asset and vendor inventories
- Documentation and reporting
- Risk scoring and prioritization
To streamline your workflow, you should consider adopting a dedicated risk management platform that enables efficiency through features like centralized risk registers and automated risk scoring.
Step 2: Define your recovery objectives and measures
Your business continuity plan is informed by your continuity and recovery objectives, often expressed through two metrics explained below:
You’ll ideally consult with your risk management team to establish these metrics. They depend on various factors, such as:
- Your organization’s size and industry
- Your compliance landscape
- Amount and sensitivity of the collected data
- Impact of downtime or operational halts
Once you decide on your target RPO and RTO, you’ll work with your team to reverse-engineer your business continuity policies and procedures accordingly. Some of the areas you need to define include:
- The critical assets and business processes that require immediate attention
- Measures for restoring IT systems, data, and infrastructure
- The workflows and resources that support your BCP
Step 3: Draft the business continuity plan—consider using a template
With a comprehensive risk analysis and clearly defined objectives in place, you can start writing your business continuity plan. You can systematically draft the following aspects of your BCP:
- Roles and responsibilities: Establish a dedicated team or specify task owners who will be in charge of the BCP implementation
- Risk management practices: Include all the strategies you’ll implement to minimize risk events
- Incident response procedures: Outline clear response and recovery procedures for each of the discovered risk events
- Cybersecurity risk mitigation: Your BCP should recommend the cadence and specific processes involved in cybersecurity practices like data backup and system maintenance
- Notification procedures: Outline how you’ll notify the affected parties, whether internal or external, in case of a business continuity event
- Maintenance protocols: Describe protocols for regular risk re-assessments and updates to keep your BCP relevant
If you’re in a highly regulated industry, you may want to formalize your BCP with the help of a suitable business continuity plan template that helps you comply with relevant regulations. For instance, Vanta offers a business continuity plan template that aligns with industry best practices and includes prompts to include critical information like key vendor contacts and alternate work sites. It offers a structured presentation of your BCP, minimizing oversights and improving credibility.
{{cta_withimage8="/cta-modules"}} | GRC implementation guide
Step 4: Test your plan
After drafting your plan, you must test it to uncover any gaps and dependencies that might impact the efficacy of the plan. This is typically done through simulations of different disruptive events, such as power outages and supply chain failures, which lets you realistically assess the BCP’s viability in maintaining critical business functions with minimal downtime.
Other notable testing techniques include:
- Walkthrough testing/tabletop exercise: An exercise that requires participants to perform specific recovery tasks
- Plan reviews: Comprehensive audits of the BCP conducted by C-level executives, the business continuity team, and department heads
- Full simulation test: Mimics the predicted consequences of an incident to assess the team’s recovery readiness
The idea behind these proactive testing measures is to keep fine-tuning your plan ongoingly to maintain team readiness and account for emerging threats.
Step 5: Conduct employee training
You need to share your BCP training modules with your employees alongside all support resources. Doing so is critical for building a culture of security and risk awareness that ensures your plan is understood contextually and will be implemented effectively.
Ideally, you’ll build a comprehensive knowledge base that includes:
- Notable continuity risks and threats alongside prevention strategies
- Scheduled business continuity procedures (like tabletop drills)
- Scenario-specific manuals (natural disasters, IT failures, regulatory changes, etc.) with response and remediation plans
- BCP metrics and post-incident analysis measures
- Decision-making and escalation channels
Support your business continuity planning practices with Vanta
Due to the breadth of activities involved, the development and implementation of a business continuity plan are the most effective when supported by the right software—and Vanta can be an excellent option.
Vanta is a robust compliance and risk management platform that streamlines numerous security procedures, including risk assessments, security reviews, and developing BCPs.
The platform offers a dedicated GRC solution, which comes equipped with features that simplify governance, risk, and compliance. The product’s functionalities that support BCP include:
- Centralized risk management
- Comprehensive access management
- Vulnerability reviews and management
- Over 375 integrations with major CRM, HRIS, and other solutions
Additionally, Vanta offers dedicated policy builder templates for frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, including options for business continuity and disaster recovery planning.
You can schedule a custom demo today to get tailored guidance on how to leverage Vanta for your BCP and risk management workflows.
{{cta_simple7="/cta-modules"}} | GRC product page
Risk
How to create a business continuity plan
Risk
Most organizations today operate in a dynamic risk environment, where their resilience and ability to maintain revenue depends on how well-prepared they are to handle business disruptions.
For instance, cybersecurity incidents and vendor-related operational disruptions can occur despite your best efforts to predict and prevent them. When they do, you need a proactive strategy in place to ensure your business can resume its operations efficiently. By integrating an elaborate business continuity plan (BCP) within your operations, you can minimize revenue loss as well as safeguard your organization’s reputation.
In this guide, we will help you prepare an actionable BCP that can effectively bridge the gap between risks and recovery. You’ll learn about:
- Key components of a BCP
- Benefits of business continuity planning
- Five steps for developing a comprehensive business continuity plan
What is a business continuity plan?
A business continuity plan defines procedures to maintain critical operations during adverse events. It offers clear guidelines to protect critical assets, adapt to recovery workflows, and ensure your organization continues delivering value to stakeholders during disruptions.
While a BCP is primarily focused on remediation, it also has a preventative component. It aims to predict, prevent, and minimize the impact of disaster events through relevant risk mitigation plans and operational protocols.
Business continuity planning is a critical component of any organization’s risk management strategy that should ideally be done during the early stages of business. Your BCP should cover all threats with a high likelihood of occurrence and/or a considerable impact on your primary operations, as well as be tested and revised regularly to account for new risks and vulnerabilities.
{{cta_withimage8="/cta-modules"}} | GRC implementation guide
Why you need a business continuity plan
From a return-on-investment (ROI) perspective, the primary benefits of a BCP include revenue protection and demonstrable operational predictability. It shows stakeholders, including investors, partners, and customers, your preparedness to execute operations during a crisis, which enhances customer trust and brand credibility in the long run.
Other notable advantages of a well-developed business continuity plan include:
- Readiness for regulatory compliance: Many regulations and standards (such as the ISO 27001) require swift incident responses and other actions to ensure business continuity, so developing a robust BCP helps you stay compliant.
- Lower downtime: Business continuity planning is particularly important for SaaS organizations because it prevents expensive downtimes that can make customers switch to a more stable alternative. According to a Ponemon Institute study, the average cost of an unplanned downtime can be nearly $9,000 per minute.
- Cost savings: Besides reducing downtime costs, a business continuity plan can help you cut costs by:
- Lowering cyber insurance premiums
- Reducing last-minute operational recovery expenses
- Preventing expenses related to data loss
- Avoiding regulatory penalties (if applicable)
- Improved business sustainability: A fully implemented BCP requires the adoption of controls and safeguards that not only fortify your security posture but also keep your operations competitive, even during challenging times.
- Visible accountability: A BCP improves accountability during disruptive events by assigning roles and responsibilities for recovery tasks and establishing communication protocols for transparency.
What does a business continuity plan include?
While the specific components of a business continuity plan can vary, some universal elements include:
- Risk assessment results: Your business continuity plan should highlight scoped risks prioritized according to their likelihood and impact
- Reporting guidelines: You should define a clear chain of command and reporting framework that defines how business continuity events and incidents will be reported
- Recovery procedures: For each identified threat, you should develop a clear set of policies and processes to follow in case of a realized risk event
- Testing procedures: You’ll outline training programs, including drills and simulations, that help your organization get familiar with the BCP
- Supporting resources: If applicable, the BCP should lead you to resources like emergency vendor lists and floor plans
Other elements of your business continuity plan will largely depend on the threats specific to you. For example, if your organization has a greater risk of natural disasters like hurricanes, you should include a relevant disaster recovery plan outlining aspects like alternate work sites, infrastructure and evaluation plans.
It’s worth noting that a disaster recovery plan typically has a narrow scope and focuses primarily on catastrophic events (large power outages, natural disasters, etc.). By contrast, a business continuity plan has a broader scope of threats, covering:
- All cybersecurity concerns, from phishing emails to data breaches
- Third-party risks
- Supply chain disruptions (e.g., transportation blocks or regulatory disruption)
{{cta_webinar1="/cta-modules"}} | Webinar: Scaling your GRC program with automation and AI
5 steps to set up a business continuity plan
Here’s a standard five-step process to help you develop an effective business continuity plan:
- Perform a comprehensive risk assessment and impact analysis
- Define your recovery objectives and measures
- Draft the business continuity plan—consider using a template
- Test your plan
- Conduct employee training
The more granular activities within each step are explained below.
Step 1: Perform a comprehensive risk assessment and impact analysis
The first step is to fully understand your risk profile and security posture. You’ll conduct a comprehensive risk assessment that lets you identify the potential likelihood and impact of mapped threats and highlight critical ones.
You may want to start by analyzing your critical business functions to identify the most disruptive vulnerabilities and the risks they pose to your organization. Then, conduct an impact assessment to determine how different threats could affect your operations.
Additionally, you can use various risk assessment methodologies to identify the risks that impact you. For example, quantitative analysis is a good option for threats you can assign numerical values to (e.g., the number of users impacted by a data breach). A qualitative analysis, on the other hand, requires brainstorming and discussions with experts to pinpoint the likelihood and impact of risks.
Risk assessment for business continuity planning involves extensive workflows, including activities such as:
- Identifying and assessing vulnerability impacts
- Maintaining asset and vendor inventories
- Documentation and reporting
- Risk scoring and prioritization
To streamline your workflow, you should consider adopting a dedicated risk management platform that enables efficiency through features like centralized risk registers and automated risk scoring.
Step 2: Define your recovery objectives and measures
Your business continuity plan is informed by your continuity and recovery objectives, often expressed through two metrics explained below:
You’ll ideally consult with your risk management team to establish these metrics. They depend on various factors, such as:
- Your organization’s size and industry
- Your compliance landscape
- Amount and sensitivity of the collected data
- Impact of downtime or operational halts
Once you decide on your target RPO and RTO, you’ll work with your team to reverse-engineer your business continuity policies and procedures accordingly. Some of the areas you need to define include:
- The critical assets and business processes that require immediate attention
- Measures for restoring IT systems, data, and infrastructure
- The workflows and resources that support your BCP
Step 3: Draft the business continuity plan—consider using a template
With a comprehensive risk analysis and clearly defined objectives in place, you can start writing your business continuity plan. You can systematically draft the following aspects of your BCP:
- Roles and responsibilities: Establish a dedicated team or specify task owners who will be in charge of the BCP implementation
- Risk management practices: Include all the strategies you’ll implement to minimize risk events
- Incident response procedures: Outline clear response and recovery procedures for each of the discovered risk events
- Cybersecurity risk mitigation: Your BCP should recommend the cadence and specific processes involved in cybersecurity practices like data backup and system maintenance
- Notification procedures: Outline how you’ll notify the affected parties, whether internal or external, in case of a business continuity event
- Maintenance protocols: Describe protocols for regular risk re-assessments and updates to keep your BCP relevant
If you’re in a highly regulated industry, you may want to formalize your BCP with the help of a suitable business continuity plan template that helps you comply with relevant regulations. For instance, Vanta offers a business continuity plan template that aligns with industry best practices and includes prompts to include critical information like key vendor contacts and alternate work sites. It offers a structured presentation of your BCP, minimizing oversights and improving credibility.
{{cta_withimage8="/cta-modules"}} | GRC implementation guide
Step 4: Test your plan
After drafting your plan, you must test it to uncover any gaps and dependencies that might impact the efficacy of the plan. This is typically done through simulations of different disruptive events, such as power outages and supply chain failures, which lets you realistically assess the BCP’s viability in maintaining critical business functions with minimal downtime.
Other notable testing techniques include:
- Walkthrough testing/tabletop exercise: An exercise that requires participants to perform specific recovery tasks
- Plan reviews: Comprehensive audits of the BCP conducted by C-level executives, the business continuity team, and department heads
- Full simulation test: Mimics the predicted consequences of an incident to assess the team’s recovery readiness
The idea behind these proactive testing measures is to keep fine-tuning your plan ongoingly to maintain team readiness and account for emerging threats.
Step 5: Conduct employee training
You need to share your BCP training modules with your employees alongside all support resources. Doing so is critical for building a culture of security and risk awareness that ensures your plan is understood contextually and will be implemented effectively.
Ideally, you’ll build a comprehensive knowledge base that includes:
- Notable continuity risks and threats alongside prevention strategies
- Scheduled business continuity procedures (like tabletop drills)
- Scenario-specific manuals (natural disasters, IT failures, regulatory changes, etc.) with response and remediation plans
- BCP metrics and post-incident analysis measures
- Decision-making and escalation channels
Support your business continuity planning practices with Vanta
Due to the breadth of activities involved, the development and implementation of a business continuity plan are the most effective when supported by the right software—and Vanta can be an excellent option.
Vanta is a robust compliance and risk management platform that streamlines numerous security procedures, including risk assessments, security reviews, and developing BCPs.
The platform offers a dedicated GRC solution, which comes equipped with features that simplify governance, risk, and compliance. The product’s functionalities that support BCP include:
- Centralized risk management
- Comprehensive access management
- Vulnerability reviews and management
- Over 375 integrations with major CRM, HRIS, and other solutions
Additionally, Vanta offers dedicated policy builder templates for frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, including options for business continuity and disaster recovery planning.
You can schedule a custom demo today to get tailored guidance on how to leverage Vanta for your BCP and risk management workflows.
{{cta_simple7="/cta-modules"}} | GRC product page
| Role: | GRC responsibilities: |
|---|---|
| Board of directors | Central to the overarching GRC strategy, this group sets the direction for the compliance strategy. They determine which standards and regulations are necessary for compliance and align the GRC strategy with business objectives. |
| Chief financial officer | Primary responsibility for the success of the GRC program and for reporting results to the board. |
| Operations managers from relevant departments | This group owns processes. They are responsible for the success and direction of risk management and compliance within their departments. |
| Representatives from relevant departments | These are the activity owners. These team members are responsible for carrying out specific compliance and risk management tasks within their departments and for integrating these tasks into their workflows. |
| Contract managers from relevant department | These team members are responsible for managing interactions with vendors and other third parties in their department to ensure all risk management and compliance measures are being taken. |
| Chief information security officer (CISO) | Defines the organization’s information security policy, designs risk and vulnerability assessments, and develops information security policies. |
| Data protection officer (DPO) or legal counsel | Develops goals for data privacy based on legal regulations and other compliance needs, designs and implements privacy policies and practices, and assesses these practices for effectiveness. |
| GRC lead | Responsible for overseeing the execution of the GRC program in collaboration with the executive team as well as maintaining the organization’s library of security controls. |
| Cybersecurity analyst(s) | Implements and monitors cybersecurity measures that are in line with the GRC program and business objectives. |
| Compliance analyst(s) | Monitors the organization’s compliance with all regulations and standards necessary, identifies any compliance gaps, and works to mitigate them. |
| Risk analyst(s) | Carries out the risk management program for the organization and serves as a resource for risk management across various departments, including identifying, mitigating, and monitoring risks. |
| IT security specialist(s) | Implements security controls within the IT system in coordination with the cybersecurity analyst(s). |
Explore more GRC articles
Introduction to GRC
Implementing a GRC program
Optimizing a GRC program
Governance
Risk
Compliance
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