Leadership 
Businesses are facing multiple risks: cyberattacks, climate disasters, and geopolitical instability, to name a few. These threats translate to tangible losses, as seen by FEMA’s findings: a big 43% of small businesses permanently close post-disaster, with another 29% failing within two years.
The question is not if your business will face disruption, but how effectively it responds. A comprehensive business continuity plan (BCP) is key to this response to identify critical processes, minimize downtime, and secure your company’s future. We’ve put together this best-practice guide to help you understand business continuity planning and implement it effectively in your organization.
What Is a Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan (BCP) is a strategic and proactive framework that outlines how a business will maintain or quickly resume essential business functions during and after a disruptive event.
Business continuity plans outline the procedures and instructions an organization must follow during such events, detailing how to minimize downtime and ensure business viability. Effective BCPs are living documents regularly reviewed, updated, and tested to reflect changes in the business environment. They provide clear, actionable guidance while remaining adaptable to potential disaster scenarios.
What Is the Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?
Business continuity plans and disaster recovery (DR) serve different but complementary purposes. Although often used interchangeably, they address different aspects of organizational resilience.
A business continuity plan is a comprehensive strategy that helps an organization maintain critical business functions during and after a disruption. It includes all aspects of the business — personnel, processes, facilities, and technology. A BCP focuses on maintaining operations and minimizing downtime.
A disaster recovery plan, on the other hand, is a subset of BCP and focuses specifically on restoring IT infrastructure and business data after a disruption. It includes technical procedures such as data backups, system recovery, and network restoration. Disaster recovery primarily concerns restoring technology.
Essentially, a business continuity plan answers the question, “How do we keep the business running?”, while a disaster recovery plan answers, “How do we restore our technology?”
A business continuity plan is a more comprehensive, strategic approach, while a disaster recovery plan provides the technical details of IT recovery. Both are essential to keep a business running smoothly.
Why Is a Business Continuity Plan Important?
Disruptions are sometimes unavoidable, but prevention isn’t. When a disaster strikes, a business continuity plan allows you to effectively respond to common business obstacles, strengthen your business, and ensure smooth operations.
1. Saves your finances
Every minute of business interruption or downtime means lost revenue, reduced productivity, and irreparable damage to customer relationships. Establishing clear business recovery objectives and procedures via continuity planning ensures business is restored quickly during unexpected events, reducing financial losses and maintaining business continuity.
2. Saves your reputation
Besides financial consequences, a disruption can also damage your business’ reputation. Customers, partners, and stakeholders expect reliability and resilience. A well-implemented business continuity plan shows preparedness, builds trust, and protects your brand’s integrity. Conversely, an inadequate response can lead to public criticism, loss of trust, and long-term reputational damage.
3. Saves you from regulatory troubles
Many industries are subject to strict regulations, like data protection, service continuity, and risk management. A well-laid-out business continuity plan helps your business meet these requirements and avoids costly penalties and legal consequences.
Key Components of an Effective Business Continuity Plan
A solid business continuity plan is essential to survive in the face of various challenges. Let’s look at the key building blocks of an effective BCP:
Emergency management
The first moments of a crisis are crucial. Emergency management includes immediate measures to protect lives and minimize initial damage. It includes evacuation plans, communication protocols, first aid measures, and incident reporting. Clear, precise, and well-rehearsed emergency management procedures ensure your organization’s safety and well-being.
Crisis management team
Effective crisis management requires clear leadership and coordinated decision-making. You need a team with defined roles and responsibilities — communication strategies, stakeholder management, resource allocation, and more. A well-structured crisis management team ensures a coordinated and decisive response.
Business recovery strategies
Business recovery strategies restore normal business processes, as unplanned interruptions can lead to setbacks and financial losses. A business impact analysis (BIA) identifies key processes and establishes recovery objectives, including alternative work arrangements, resource allocation, and procedural workarounds.
IT recovery
Technology is the backbone of most business operations. IT recovery includes procedures for recovering IT infrastructure, data, and applications. Using data backups, system redundancy, and recovery testing, a strong IT recovery plan minimizes data loss and rapidly recovers critical systems.
Supply chain continuity
Supply chain disruptions can have cascading effects on business operations. This component of a BCP addresses organizational resilience by identifying critical suppliers, assessing vulnerabilities, and developing alternative procurement strategies. This includes handling supplier risks, contingent contracts, and inventory management.
Understanding Your Business and Risks
Before developing a business continuity plan, understand your organization’s key functions and threats through the following two key processes:
Business impact analysis (BIA)
The BIA is a systematic process that identifies and prioritizes key business areas. It determines the impact of disruptions on those functions over time.
To create a BIA, first, identify the processes essential to your business’s survival and continued operation. These functions have the greatest impact on your business. For each function, analyze the operational, financial, and reputational consequences of disruptions at different time intervals (e.g., hours, days, weeks). Quantify these impacts whenever possible.
Based on the impact analysis, establish clear recovery objectives, including:
- Maximum tolerable downtime (MTD): The maximum acceptable time a function can be unavailable.
- Recovery time objective (RTO): The target time for restoring the function after a disruption.
- Recovery point objective (RPO): The acceptable amount of data loss in terms of time.
Finally, identify the resources needed to restore each function, including personnel, equipment, data, and facilities.
Risk assessment
While the BIA determines what needs to be protected, risk assessment determines what you want to protect against. It identifies key threats and assesses their likelihood and impact.
- Identify critical threats: Consider broader disruptions, including natural disasters, cyberattacks, outages, technology failures, human errors, and other disruptions.
- Assess likelihood and impact: For each identified threat, consider the likelihood of occurrence and the impact on your business. Use a risk matrix to prioritize threats based on severity.
- Consider geographic and industry-specific risks: Tailor your assessment to your company’s location and industry. For example, a coastal company should prioritize hurricane risks, while a technology company should focus on cyber threats.
- Integrate BIA and risk assessment: The insights from BIA and risk assessment should be integrated to create a focused framework for developing targeted continuity strategies. BIA shows you what is critical, and risk assessment shows what threatens those operations.
Developing and Implementing Your Business Continuity Plan
The business continuity planning process requires a careful selection of resources, including software, tools, and services. Here’s a step-by-step guide for developing and implementing an effective BCP.
1. Assemble your core team
Form a dedicated planning team with representatives from all key business areas — IT, operations, human resources (HR), finance, and communications, to name a few. Designate a project manager to steer the project and secure senior leadership support to get the necessary resources and support. Don’t be afraid to seek outside help, either. Bring in external consultants for specialized expertise if needed.
2. Document your plan
Once your team is assembled, it’s time to get writing. Create a business continuity plan that outlines all procedures, responsibilities, and contact information. Add an executive summary, a quick reference guide, and practical checklists for specific scenarios. Store the document securely in multiple locations, both digitally and physically.
3. Craft detailed recovery strategies
Based on your BIA, develop a detailed recovery plan for each key function. Define who needs what and where. Also, evaluate and use a business continuity planning suite from governmental sources like Ready under the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assist in managing the planning process.
Next, define clear roles and responsibilities for your recovery teams. Identify alternative work locations, equipment, and resources. Don’t forget about communication — establish communication protocols for your internal team and external stakeholders.
Also, create detailed IT recovery procedures, including data backups and recovery plans, continuity strategies, alternative suppliers, and inventory management.
4. Activate emergency procedures
Implement emergency procedures that prioritize people’s safety. Establish clear evacuation procedures, assembly points, and accountability processes. Develop communication protocols for emergency notifications and ensure everyone knows what to do during a medical emergency. Secure your facilities and equipment when possible.
5. Establish a crisis management team
You need a command center, and a group of leaders to direct your response. Form a crisis management team with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and decision-making authorities. Develop communication strategies for internal and external stakeholders and conduct regular training and simulations for your crisis management team.
6. Empower your workforce
A plan is only as good as the people who can implement it. Training and awareness are key components of a successful BCP. Employees need to be well-informed about the plan and their roles and responsibilities. Make sure to conduct regular training sessions, led by business unit managers or HR staff, with senior management kicking off the training to emphasize its significance.
Develop clear communication channels for disseminating information during a crisis and include business continuity training in the onboarding process for new employees as well.
7. Test and refine
You have a plan, now it’s time to test it. Conduct business games, functional exercises, and comprehensive simulations. Learn from each test, document lessons learned and opportunities for improvement, and update the BCP accordingly.
8. Maintain and evolve
Continuous communication and awareness campaigns help keep the BCP top of mind for all employees. These initiatives ensure everyone understands the importance of the plan and can act accordingly in the event of a disruption. With a culture of preparedness and resilience, businesses can ensure that their business continuity plans are not only well-designed but also effectively implemented.
9. Secure stakeholder buy-in
For a business continuity plan to be effective, you need the full support and awareness of the entire organization, starting with senior management. Leadership plays a critical role in prioritizing the BCP, dedicating time to its review, and ensuring it’s thoroughly tested. Their commitment underpins the importance of the plan and sets the tone for the rest of the company.
10. Leverage resources
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use business continuity templates and resources from trusted organizations like FEMA (referenced above) and ISO. Various standards, such as ISO 22301, provide guidelines for developing effective business continuity management systems (BCMS). These standards help organizations create robust continuity plans that address potential threats and ensure business continuity.
| View a continuity plan template from FEMA. Find it here. |
Building a Resilient Future
In times of uncertainty, the ability to adapt to disruption and grow is paramount. A well-developed business continuity plan enables you to understand your organization’s critical functions, assess potential risks, and develop practical ways to recover. It forms the foundation for resilience.
A strong business continuity plan minimizes downtime, protects your reputation, ensures compliance, and secures financial stability. Business continuity is an ongoing process. Focus on continuous improvement, test your plan regularly, and adapt it to the evolving threat scenarios.
The investments you make today will pay off when disruption inevitably occurs. Act now. Assemble your team, document your plan, train your employees, and test your capabilities. Building a resilient future starts with preparation.
What steps will you take today to ensure your organization is ready for the challenges of tomorrow?
How Nextiva Helps Maintain Business Continuity
Reliable communication is the backbone of business continuity. Nextiva’s cloud communications platform keeps your business connected through any disruption. Here’s how:
- Uninterrupted communication: Nextiva’s geographically redundant network ensures your phones, messaging, and video conferencing stay operational, even during local outages. Automatic failover to backup connections (like cellular data and Wi-Fi calling) keeps you online.
- Work-from-anywhere flexibility: The Nextiva App empowers your team to work seamlessly from any location on any device (desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet). This is essential when physical offices are unavailable.
- Built-in scalability: Quickly add or remove users to the platform to assist with unforeseen events.
- Simplified, unified communications: Voice, video, messaging, and collaboration are integrated into one platform, ensuring everyone stays connected and productive, regardless of location.
- Always-on support and security: Nextiva’s 24/7 support and robust security measures (including encryption and fraud monitoring) minimize disruptions and protect your communications.
Nextiva provides a vital communication lifeline, enabling your team to better collaborate and serve customers.
ONE communications tool for your team.
Streamline several communication channels into ONE with Nextiva.
FAQs
The main purpose of a business continuity plan is to ensure that an organization can sustain normal operations during and after a crisis, which is vital for protecting profitability and maintaining customer service.
The testing frequency depends on your risk profile and industry regulations. Conduct comprehensive simulations at least annually. Regular business games and functional exercises should be conducted more frequently, ideally quarterly.
Absolutely. Small businesses are often more vulnerable to disruptions due to limited resources. A business continuity plan helps them prioritize critical functions, allocate resources effectively, and minimize downtime.
Establish a regular review schedule, ideally annually, and update the BCP after big organizational changes, system implementations, or incidents. Maintain version control and distribution records.
Common mistakes include: failing to involve key stakeholders, neglecting to test the plan regularly, focusing solely on IT recovery, and not considering other key disruptions.
