Why business continuity is more than backups
Backups recover data; business continuity keeps the business running. A business continuity policy defines how critical functions continue or are quickly restored during a disruption — an outage, a supplier failure, a cyberattack or a site loss.
What to include
- Scope and objectives — which functions are critical and the tolerance for downtime.
- Business impact analysis (BIA) — identify critical processes, dependencies and the cost of downtime.
- Recovery objectives — RTO (how fast you must recover) and RPO (how much data loss is acceptable) per function.
- Continuity strategies — failover, alternate sites, manual workarounds, key supplier alternatives.
- Roles and communication — who declares an event, who leads, how staff and customers are informed.
- Testing — at least annual exercises (tabletop or full), with results feeding improvements.
- Review — keep the plan current as the business changes.
Common mistakes
- A plan that lists IT recovery only, ignoring people, premises and suppliers.
- RTO/RTO set without a BIA, so they are guesses.
- Never exercising the plan, so gaps surface only during a real crisis.
Framework alignment
Maps to ISO 27001:2022 Annex A 5.29–5.30 (continuity and ICT readiness), the SOC 2 availability criteria, NIST CSF Recover, and supports DORA operational-resilience requirements.
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