sample small business continuity plan

What Is A Business Continuity Plan? [+ Template & Examples]

Published: December 30, 2022

When a business crisis occurs, the last thing you want to do is panic.

The second-to-last thing you want to do is be unprepared. Crises typically arise without warning. While you shouldn't start every day expecting the worst, you should be relatively prepared for anything to happen.

A business crisis can cost your company a lot of money and ruin your reputation if you don't have a business continuity plan in place. Customers aren't very forgiving, especially when a crisis is influenced by accidents within the company or other preventable mistakes. If you want your company to be able to maintain its business continuity in the face of a crisis, then you'll need to come up with this type of plan to uphold its essential functions.

In this post, we'll explain what a business continuity plan is, give examples of scenarios that would require a business continuity plan, and provide a template that you can use to create a well-rounded program for your business.

Table of Contents:

What is a business continuity plan?

• Business Continuity Types
• Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity Plan Template

How to write a business continuity plan.

• Business Continuity Examples

A business continuity plan outlines directions and procedures that your company will follow when faced with a crisis. These plans include business procedures, names of assets and partners, human resource functions, and other helpful information that can help maintain your brand's relationships with relevant stakeholders. The goal of a business continuity plan is to handle anything from minor disruptions to full-blown threats.

For example, one crisis that your business may have to respond to is a severe snowstorm. Your team may be wondering, "If a snowstorm disrupted our supply chain, how would we resume business?" Planning contingencies ahead of time for situations like these can help your business stay afloat when you're faced with an unavoidable crisis.

When you think about business continuity in terms of the essential functions your business requires to operate, you can begin to mitigate and plan for specific risks within those functions.

Crisis Communication and Management Kit

Manage, plan for, and communicate during your corporate crises with these crisis management plan templates.

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Business Continuity Planning

Business continuity planning is the process of creating a plan to address a crisis. When writing out a business continuity plan, it's important to consider the variety of crises that could potentially affect the company and prepare a resolution for each.

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Blog Business 7 Business Continuity Plan Examples

7 Business Continuity Plan Examples

Written by: Danesh Ramuthi Nov 28, 2023

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a strategic framework that prepares businesses to maintain or swiftly resume their critical functions in the face of disruptions, whether they stem from natural disasters, technological failures, human error, or other unforeseen events.

In today’s fast-paced world, businesses face an array of potential disruptions ranging from cyberattacks and ransomware to severe weather events and global pandemics. By having a well-crafted BCP, businesses can mitigate these risks, ensuring the safety and continuity of their critical services and operations. To further safeguard their operations, integrating measures to protect against ransomware into their BCP is a natural and essential step.

Responsibility for business continuity planning typically lies with top management and dedicated planning teams within an organization. It is a cross-functional effort that involves input and coordination across various departments, ensuring that all aspects of the business are considered.

For businesses looking to develop or refine their business continuity strategies, there are numerous resources available. Tools like Venngage’s business plan maker and their business continuity plan templates offer practical assistance, streamlining the process of creating a robust and effective BCP. 

Click to jump ahead: 

7 business continuity plan examples

Business continuity types, how to write a business continuity plan, how often should a business continuity plan be reviewed, business continuity plan vs. disaster recovery plan, final thoughts.

In business, unpredictability is the only certainty. This is where business continuity plans (BCPs) come into play. These plans are not just documents; they are a testament to a company’s preparedness and commitment to sustained operations under adverse conditions. To illustrate the practicality and necessity of these plans, let’s delve into some compelling examples.

Business continuity plan example for small business

Imagine a small business specializing in digital marketing services, with a significant portion of its operations reliant on continuous internet connectivity and digital communication tools. This business, although small, caters to a global clientele, making its online presence and prompt service delivery crucial.

Scope and objective:

This Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is designed to ensure the continuity of digital marketing services and client communications in the event of an unforeseen and prolonged internet outage. Such an outage could be caused by a variety of factors, including cyberattacks, technical failures or service provider issues. The plan aims to minimize disruption to these critical services, ensuring that client projects are delivered on time and communication lines remain open and effective.

Operations at risk:

Operation: Digital Marketing Services Operation Description: A team dedicated to creating and managing digital marketing campaigns for clients across various time zones. Business Impact: High Impact Description: The team manages all client communications, campaign designs, and real-time online marketing strategies. An internet outage would halt all ongoing campaigns and client communications, leading to potential loss of business and client trust.

Recovery strategy:

The BCP should include immediate measures like switching to a backup internet service provider or using mobile data as a temporary solution. The IT team should be prepared to deploy these alternatives swiftly.

Immediate measures within the BCP should encompass alternatives like switching to a backup internet service provider or utilizing mobile data, supplemented by tools such as backup and recovery systems, cloud-based disaster recovery solutions, and residential proxies , while the IT team should be prepared to deploy these swiftly. 

Additionally, the company should have a protocol for informing clients about the situation via alternative communication channels like mobile phones.

Roles and responsibilities:

Representative: Alex Martinez Role: IT Manager Description of Responsibilities:

• Oversee the implementation of the backup internet connectivity plan.
• Coordinate with the digital marketing team to ensure minimal disruption in campaign management.
• Communicate with the service provider for updates and resolution timelines.

Business continuity plan example for software company

In the landscape of software development, a well-structured Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is vital. This example illustrates a BCP for a software company, focusing on a different kind of disruption: a critical data breach.

Scope and objectives:

This BCP is designed to ensure the continuity of software development and client data security in the event of a significant data breach. Such a breach could be due to cyberattacks, internal security lapses, or third-party service vulnerabilities. The plan prioritizes the rapid response to secure data, assess the impact on software development projects and maintain client trust and communication.

Operation: Software Development and Data Security Operation Description: The software development team is responsible for creating and maintaining software products, which involves handling sensitive client data. In the realm of software development, where the creation and maintenance of products involve handling sensitive client data, prioritizing security is crucial. Strengthen your software development team’s capabilities by incorporating the best antivirus with VPN features, offering a robust defense to protect client information and maintain a secure operational environment. The integrity and security of this data are paramount.

Business Impact: Critical Impact Description: A data breach could compromise client data, leading to loss of trust, legal consequences and potential financial penalties. It could also disrupt ongoing development projects and delay product releases.

The IT security team should immediately isolate the breached systems to prevent further data loss, leveraging data loss prevention tools to further enhance protection. They should then work on identifying the breach’s source and extent. Simultaneously, the client relations team should inform affected clients about the breach and the steps being taken. The company should also engage a third-party cybersecurity or pentest firm for an independent investigation and recovery assistance.

Representative: Sarah Lopez Role: Head of IT Security Contact Details: [email protected] Description of Responsibilities:

• Lead the initial response to the data breach, including system isolation and assessment.
• Coordinate with external cybersecurity experts for breach analysis and mitigation.
• Work with the legal team to understand and comply with data breach notification laws.
• Communicate with the software development team leaders about the impact on ongoing projects.

Related: 7 Best Business Plan Software for 2023

Business continuity plan example for manufacturing

In the manufacturing sector, disruptions can significantly impact production lines, supply chains, and customer commitments. This example of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) for a manufacturing company addresses a specific scenario: a major supply chain disruption.

This BCP is formulated to ensure the continuity of manufacturing operations in the event of a significant supply chain disruption. Such disruptions could be caused by geopolitical events, natural disasters affecting key suppliers or transportation network failures. The plan focuses on maintaining production capabilities and fulfilling customer orders by managing and mitigating supply chain risks.

Operation: Production Line Operation Description: The production line is dependent on a steady supply of raw materials and components from various suppliers to manufacture products. Business Impact: High Impact Description: A disruption in the supply chain can lead to a halt in production, resulting in delayed order fulfillment, loss of revenue and potential damage to customer relationships.

The company should establish relationships with alternative suppliers to ensure a diversified supply chain. In the event of a disruption, the procurement team should be able to quickly switch to these alternative sources. Additionally, maintaining a strategic reserve of critical materials can buffer short-term disruptions. The logistics team should also develop flexible transportation plans to adapt to changing scenarios.

Representative: Michael Johnson Role: Head of Supply Chain Management Contact Details: [email protected] Description of Responsibilities:

• Monitor global supply chain trends and identify potential risks.
• Develop and maintain relationships with alternative suppliers.
• Coordinate with logistics to ensure flexible transportation solutions.
• Communicate with production managers about supply chain status and potential impacts on production schedules.

Related: 15+ Business Plan Templates for Strategic Planning

BCPs are essential for ensuring that a business can continue operating during crises. Here’s a summary of the different types of business continuity plans that are common:

• Operational : Involves ensuring that critical systems and processes continue functioning without disruption. It’s vital to have a plan to minimize revenue loss in case of disruptions.
• Technological : For businesses heavily reliant on technology, this type of continuity plan focuses on maintaining and securing internal systems, like having offline storage for important documents.
• Economic continuity : This type ensures that the business remains profitable during disruptions. It involves future-proofing the organization against scenarios that could negatively impact the bottom line.
• Workforce continuity : Focuses on maintaining adequate and appropriate staffing levels, especially during crises, ensuring that the workforce is capable of handling incoming work.
• Safety : Beyond staffing, safety continuity involves creating a comfortable and secure work environment where employees feel supported, especially during crises.
• Environmental : It addresses the ability of the team to operate effectively and safely in their physical work environment, considering threats to physical office spaces and planning accordingly.
• Security : Means prioritizing the safety and security of employees and business assets, planning for potential security breaches and safeguarding important business information.
• Reputation : Focuses on maintaining customer satisfaction and a good reputation, monitoring conversations about the brand and having action plans for reputation management.

As I have explained so far, a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is invaluable. Writing an effective BCP involves a series of strategic steps, each crucial to ensuring that your business can withstand and recover from unexpected events. Here’s a guide on how to craft a robust business continuity plan:

1. Choose your business continuity team

Assemble a dedicated team responsible for the development and implementation of the BCP. The team should include members from various departments with a deep understanding of the business operations.

2. Outline your plan objectives

Clearly articulate what the plan aims to achieve. Objectives may include minimizing financial loss, ensuring the safety of employees, maintaining critical business operations, and protecting the company’s reputation.

3. Meet with key players in your departments

Engage with department heads and key personnel to gain insights into the specific needs and processes of each department. This helps in identifying critical functions and resources.

4. Identify critical functions and types of threats

Determine which functions are vital to the business’s survival and identify potential threats that could impact these areas. 

5. Carry on risk assessments across different areas

Evaluate the likelihood and impact of identified threats on each critical function. This assessment helps in prioritizing the risks and planning accordingly.

6. Conduct a business impact analysis (BIA)

Perform a BIA to understand the potential consequences of disruption to critical business functions. It has to be done in determining the maximum acceptable downtime and the resources needed for business continuity.

7. Start drafting the plan

Compile the information gathered into a structured document. The plan should include emergency contact information, recovery strategies and detailed action steps for different scenarios.

8. Test the plan for any gaps

Conduct simulations or tabletop exercises to test the plan’s effectiveness. This testing can reveal unforeseen gaps or weaknesses in the plan.

9. Review & revise your plan

Use the insights gained from testing to refine and update the plan. Continual revision ensures the plan remains relevant and effective in the face of changing business conditions and emerging threats.

Read Also: How to Write a Business Plan Outline [Examples + Templates]

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) should ideally be reviewed and updated at least annually. 

The annual review ensures that the plan remains relevant and effective in the face of new challenges and changes within the business, such as shifts in business strategy, introduction of new technology or changes in operational processes. 

Additionally, it’s crucial to reassess the BCP following any significant business changes, such as mergers, acquisitions or entry into new markets, as well as after the occurrence of any major incident that tested the plan’s effectiveness. 

However, in rapidly changing industries or in businesses that face a high degree of uncertainty or frequent changes, more frequent reviews – such as bi-annually or quarterly – may be necessary. 

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) are two crucial components of organizational preparedness, yet they serve different functions. The BCP is aimed at preventing interruptions to business operations and maintaining regular activities. 

It focuses on aspects such as the location of operations during a crisis (like a temporary office or remote work), how staff will communicate and which functions are prioritized. In essence, a BCP details how a business can continue operating during and after a disruption​​​​.

On the other hand, a DRP is more specific to restoring data access and IT infrastructure after a disaster. It describes the steps that employees must follow during and after a disaster to ensure minimal function necessary for the organization to continue. 

Essentially, while a BCP is about maintaining operations, a DRP is about restoring critical functions, particularly IT-related, after a disruption has occurred​

It’s clear that having a robust and adaptable business continuity plan (BCP) is not just a strategic advantage but a fundamental necessity for businesses of all sizes and sectors. 

From small businesses to large corporations, the principles of effective business continuity planning remain consistent: identify potential threats, assess the impact on critical functions, and develop a comprehensive strategy to maintain operations during and after a disruption.

The process of writing a BCP, as detailed in this article, underscores the importance of a thorough and thoughtful approach. It’s about more than just drafting a document; it’s about creating a living framework that evolves with your business and the changing landscape of risks.

To assist in this crucial task, you can use Venngage’s business plan maker & their business continuity plan templates . These tools streamline the process of creating a BCP, ensuring that it is not only comprehensive but also clear, accessible and easy to implement. 

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16 Business Continuity Plan Templates For Every Business

As a business leader, you know that unforeseen events can disrupt your business operations and impact your bottom line. That's why having a solid business continuity plan in place is essential.

But where do you start? That's where we come in. This article provides you with 16 free, customizable business continuity plan templates that are prefilled with examples, making it easy to create a plan that meets your unique needs. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, our templates are designed to help you prepare for any contingency.

In addition to the templates, we've included a step-by-step guide on how to create an effective business continuity plan. From identifying risks and critical functions to testing and updating your plan, our guide covers everything you need to know.

General Business Continuity Plan Template

New to business continuity planning? No worries! Our general BCP Template is like a friendly guide—perfect for both newcomers and veterans. Use it to get the ball rolling on your continuity planning initiative and create robust strategies that will keep your business operational in times of crisis.

How to use this template? 👀

1. Sign up to get instant access to your chosen template. (Yes, it’s 100% free.) 

2. Customize the template to fit your needs: 

• Define your focus areas or strategic priorities 
• Set strategic objectives  
• Assign KPIs and owners 
• Create action plans and projects to achieve your desired outcomes 

3. Integrate all business data in one place for a comprehensive view of performance. 

4. Use reports and dashboards to monitor progress and identify risks before they escalate. 

5. Invite your team members to collaborate and ensure everyone is working toward the same goals. 

👉 Click here to get your FREE Business Continuity Plan Template

💡All templates below follow the same structure. The only difference lies in the pre-filled sample data, making them customized for specific industries and use cases.

Industry-Specific Business Continuity Plan Templates

Hospitality bcp template.

Craft a resilience plan for your hospitality business, including hotels, restaurants, or travel services. This BCP template for Hospitality will help you establish measures to handle potential emergency situations and ensure customer satisfaction.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Hospitality Continuity Plan Template

Manufacturing BCP Template

Ensure uninterrupted production and operations with this Manufacturing Continuity Plan Template . Use this template to keep your business partner relationships, supply chains, and production lines strong, even when surprises pop up.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Manufacturing Continuity Plan Template

Transportation BCP Template

Need a solid game plan for spotting risks early and building strong strategies to manage disruptions in your transportation business? Create your own with the BCP Template for Transportation to maintain timely deliveries and operations.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Transportation Continuity Plan Template

Healthcare BCP Template

In an industry where lives depend on service reliability, the Healthcare Business Continuity Plan Template helps you build and execute contingency plans to ensure uninterrupted care and handle emergencies effectively.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Healthcare Continuity Plan Template

Retail BCP Template

Strengthen your retail business's resilience to unforeseen events like global pandemics, supply chain disruptions, or surges in demand. With this Retail BCP Template , establish plans for inventory management, customer service, and store operations.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Retail Business Continuity Plan Template

Pharmaceuticals BCP Template

Keep vital manufacturing and supply chain operations running like clockwork with our Pharmaceuticals BCP Template . This template has everything you need to hit the ground running on your continuity planning. Use it to ensure your business doesn’t miss a beat because of trade disputes, regulations, and recalls.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Pharmaceutical Business Continuity Plan Template

Financial Services BCP Template

The BCP Template for Financial Services is designed to assist financial professionals concerned about their continuity and resilience. Use it to identify and plan strategies to keep your business sailing steady and navigate business continuity management like a seasoned professional.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Financial Business Continuity Plan Template

Telecommunications BCP Template

Our Business Continuity Plan Template for Telecommunications is ideal for internet service providers, telcos, and MSPs that want to keep their telecommunication services humming along, no matter what. Use it to outline strategies to reduce the risk of disruptions such as new technology, regulatory changes, and cyber-attacks.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Telecommunications Business Continuity Plan Template

IT BCP Template

Create a comprehensive continuity plan for your information technology business with the IT Business Continuity Plan Template . This template will help you formulate and execute strategies for data center security, network downtime planning, and maintaining service levels. 

👉 Click here to get your FREE IT Business Continuity Plan Template

Nonprofits BCP Template

Ensure that your nonprofit's mission endures through unexpected events and map out your organization's preparedness with the Business Continuity Plan Template for Nonprofits . This template guides nonprofits in developing strategies for funding, communication, and service delivery during crises such as natural disasters. 

👉 Click here to get your FREE Nonprofit Continuity Plan Template

Small Business BCP Template

Build resilience and safeguard your small business to weather uncertainties with the Small Business Continuity Plan Template . With this prefilled template, you’ll be able to kickstart the strategic planning process to build effective recovery procedures and disaster mitigation strategies.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Small Business Continuity Plan Template

Special Focus Templates 

Supply chain continuity template.

Strengthen the resilience of your supply chain with this Supply Chain Business Continuity Plan Template . Use it to create and track strategies to mitigate risks such as supplier failures, transportation disruptions, and inventory shortages, ensuring a steady flow of goods and services.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Supply Chain Continuity Plan Template

Operational Continuity Plan Template

Keep your business operations running smoothly, irrespective of unforeseen challenges, with the Operational Continuity Plan Template . With it, you can quickly create an actionable Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) that guarantees your business’s preparedness when disaster strikes.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Operational Continuity Plan Template

Risk Assessment Plan Template

Risk management is at the heart of any successful continuity planning strategy. Why? Because knowing the risks your organization faces is the first step to preparing for, and effectively navigating unforeseen circumstances. 

If you're ready to start building your BCP, begin with the Risk Assessment Plan Template . This framework is designed to help you pinpoint potential risks, measure their impact, and craft proactive strategies to dodge business disruptions.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Risk Assessment Plan Template

Crisis Communications Plan Template

Effectively manage internal and external communications during a crisis with this Crisis Communications Plan Template . Ensure the right messages reach your stakeholders, employees, and customers on time. This will contribute to a well-coordinated response and support your human resources team in managing crisis-related communications effectively.

👉 Click here to get your FREE Communications Plan Template

How To Write A Business Continuity Plan 

A clear business continuity plan helps teams act quickly and effectively, minimizing disruptions to operations. If you want to build a resilient business continuity plan, here's a true-and-tried approach:

1. Identify critical business processes and types of threats

First, figure out which parts of your business are the most important. Why is this so crucial? When things go wrong, you can't keep every part of your business going—it's just not practical.

But, many senior management teams stumble at this stage because they:

• Take a siloed approach to continuity planning.
• Misidentify the core processes integral to business success.
• Exclude critical stakeholders when trying to understand what drives the business.
• Rely on outdated risk assessments and information for planning.

As PwC puts it, " Businesses struggle to do this well because it’s complex and can involve multiple departments and players. It’s not the usual approach in which business continuity is looked at solely within the siloed functions. ”

To build a resilient BCP, thoroughly examine your business, engage all stakeholders, and really understand your key business functions and processes.

2. Perform a risk assessment

Risk assessments help companies understand potential threats, their severity, and their likelihood. This crucial step aids in prioritizing planning, encourages strategic thinking, and empowers problem-solving abilities.

💡 Check out our article Risk Matrix: How To Use It In Strategic Planning for guidance . 

3. Conduct a Business Impact Analysis and prioritize strategies

A Business Impact Analysis evaluates the possible consequences of risks on your crucial business operations . It’s vital for gathering information, developing appropriate recovery strategies, and setting strategic priorities.

Consider impact such as:

• Lost or delayed sales and income
• Increased expenses
• Regulatory fines
• Loss of business opportunities
• Operational setbacks
• Reputation damage
• Loss of shareholder confidence
• Supply chain disruption

4. Build your business continuity plan

Finally, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and turn your research, risk assessment, and business impact analysis into a fully-fledged business continuity plan. 

Your continuity plan should act as a roadmap. It should outline how your organization will keep the gears turning in the face of disruptions.

Here are the key elements: 

• 🎯 Objectives
• ⏳ Timelines
• 🏆 Priorities
• 👥 Team members
• 📝 Projects and action plans

If you’re using Cascade strategy templates , you’ll have these vital elements ready and waiting to help you plan faster and better.

💡Don't spend too much time on analysis and planning. There is no such thing as a perfect plan. Instead, focus on the execution and adapt your plan as you go. 

Tips For Writing And Executing Your Business Continuity Plan

Want to create a business that can ride the wave of any disruption? You'll need a fresh take on strategic risk management and continuity planning. The real magic happens when you blend centralized observability and fast execution . 

Creating your plan shouldn't be a one-and-done deal. You need to keep an eye on things and tweak your strategies as needed. This is where Cascade strategy execution platform shines.

Cascade’s customizable dashboards give you real-time insights into your business operations. See the big picture or drill down to team-specific details, all in one place. This helps in identifying issues early and implementing your continuity plan effectively.

Time is of the essence when a crisis hits. Decision-makers need information fast. Cascade's Reports lets you create concise strategy reports with up-to-date data and charts with a click. No more wasting time on manual reporting.

Continuity planning is an ongoing, iterative process. Risks change, and your strategies should evolve accordingly. With Cascade, you can continuously monitor performance and make necessary adjustments to your business continuity plan in one place.

“Cascade provides our organization with a level of transparency we've never experienced before. Traditionally siloed teams have insight into what other groups are working on, facilitating a new level of engagement and cross-team collaboration.” - Katie B, G2

📚 Recommended reads for more tips and best practices: 

6 Steps To Successful Strategy Execution

Strategic Control Simplified: A 6-Step Process And Tools  

Get Faster Insights And Make Better Decisions With Cascade 🚀

As the world’s #1 strategy execution platform, Cascade cuts through the chaos of running business operations and paves a clear path forward.

Build continuity plans that are data-driven and aligned with your long-term vision.

Cascade helps you diagnose where you stand today and understand the factors affecting your performance, leading to informed and confident decisions.

What’s more, Cascade centralizes visibility over your execution process. This means you can swiftly identify dependencies and potential risks, and act proactively to mitigate them.

Ready to take control? Sign up for a free forever account today or book a 1:1 product tour with one of Cascade’s in-house strategy execution experts.

Business Continuity FAQs

What are the 4 ps of business continuity .

The 4 Ps of business continuity is a way of measuring the impact of disruptions on an organization. They stand for People (the impact on the lives of workers), Processes (the effect on operations), Profits (the impact on revenue generation), and Partnerships (the impact on the enabling business environment).

What is the difference between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan? 

The main difference between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan is its purpose. A business continuity plan aims to sustain the critical functions of an organization during disruptions, while a disaster recovery plan outlines the strategy for restoring normal business operations after major disruptions.

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It’s not always fun thinking about things that could go wrong. But when you’re creating a business, taking the time to think about these things can help prevent risk. Creating a solid backup plan for your business can help ensure success—even if something bad happens. That’s where a business continuity plan can help.

What is a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a long-term strategy to help your business overcome and recover from major roadblocks. Creating a BCP ensures that, even if something goes wrong, your business still has a strategy in place to overcome that issue.

What’s the difference between a business continuity plan and a contingency plan?

What is a business continuity plan template.

A business continuity plan template is the basic framework of a continuity plan, which you can easily duplicate whenever you need to create a new plan.It’s intended to be used as a skeleton, so your team can fill it with the important information needed to establish a strong business continuity plan.

Using a business continuity plan template ensures that every single BCP you create has all the necessary information your team needs to make the plan successful. When there’s a repeatable framework, your team becomes more familiar with what information goes into a BCP. As a result, they’ll be more comfortable using the plan, should the situation arise. 

What components does a business continuity plan template have?

The goal of a business continuity plan template is to help everyone on your team understand what to do after an emergency happens. That means your BCP template should organize key information into the following categories. That way, your team can fill out the correct information when you build your strategy.

Directly responsible individuals (DRIs) or important tiger teams : These are the individual points of contact you would go to in case of an emergency. You’ll find contact information for the DRIs, plus the best way to reach them in this section.

Risk assessment: This includes risk analysis documents such as a risk register , which analyzes potential setbacks a project or your business may encounter. 

Action plan : The step-by-step plan your team will follow if an emergency happens.

Recovery procedures: This section details the steps your team should take to recover from any major business interruptions.

Crucial business functions: The key aspects of the business that are necessary to keep things functioning. These are the bare minimum operations that your business needs running smoothly if you want to stay functional. It’s important to highlight these functions so your team knows which areas to focus on should an emergency arise. 

Succession plan : In the event that leaders or DRIs are unable to fill a role, a succession plan provides a back-up person to take their place. 

Internal communication strategy: It’s important to develop a communication plan for how you share information with your entire team. Developing a communication strategy beforehand can help prevent misinformation and confusing messaging from going out to your team during emergency situations.

Alternate business processes (aka backup plans): This section details alternate ways your business can still function even if a part of it fails. This can include alternate vendors or suppliers, or manual workarounds for automated tasks. 

Why you should use a business continuity plan template

Using a business continuity plan template can help your team in a few different ways. Here’s how.

Faster recovery: When disaster happens, you want to be able to recover quickly to minimize the amount of downtime your company faces. Having a BCP template prepared can help minimize the amount of time it takes to develop a full BCP strategy.

Create multiple fail-safes: Sometimes one BCP is not enough. A BCP template can help you create multiple plans so you have more than one way to recover should an emergency occur. 

Insurance doesn’t cover everything: While insuring your business is a smart move, it won’t be able to help you in all situations, such as an economic downturn. Using a BCP template means your business is ready to develop a strategy before any external environments begin to change, so your team can start planning as soon as you catch wind of something on the horizon. 

Integrated features

List View . List View is a grid-style view that makes it easy to see all of your project’s information at a glance. Like a to-do list or a spreadsheet, List View displays all of your tasks at once so you can not only see task titles and due dates, but also view any relevant custom fields like Priority, Status, or more. Unlock effortless collaboration by giving your entire team visibility into who’s doing what by when.

Subtasks . Sometimes a to-do is too big to capture in one task. If a task has more than one contributor, a broad due date, or stakeholders that need to review and approve before it can go live, subtasks can help. Subtasks are a powerful way to distribute work and split tasks into individual components—while keeping the small to-dos connected to the overarching context of the parent task. Break tasks into smaller components or capture the individual components of a multi-step process with subtasks. 

Custom fields . Custom fields are the best way to tag, sort, and filter work. Create unique custom fields for any information you need to track—from priority and status to email or phone number. Use custom fields to sort and schedule your to-dos so you know what to work on first. Plus, share custom fields across tasks and projects to ensure consistency across your organization. 

Messaging . Need to share information that isn’t actionable? Try Messages in Asana. Messages enable you to communicate within Asana about non-actionable work. You can send messages to any combination of individuals, teams, and projects, so everyone is on the same page. Link to tasks, projects, and Goals in Asana to make it easy for your message recipients to gain context and drill down into the details.

Suggested apps

Microsoft Teams . With the Microsoft Teams + Asana integration, you can search for and share the information you need without leaving Teams. Easily connect your Teams conversations to actionable items in Asana. Plus, create, assign, and view tasks during a Teams Meeting without needing to switch to your browser.

Slack . Turn ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into trackable tasks and comments in Asana. Go from quick questions and action items to tasks with assignees and due dates. Easily capture work so requests and to-dos don’t get lost in Slack. 

Google Workplace . Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Google Workplace file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane. Easily attach any My Drive file with just a few clicks.

Zoom . Asana and Zoom are partnering up to help teams have more purposeful and focused meetings. The Zoom + Asana integration makes it easy to prepare for meetings, hold actionable conversations, and access information once the call is over. Meetings begin in Asana, where shared meeting agendas provide visibility and context about what will be discussed. During the meeting, team members can quickly create tasks within Zoom, so details and action items don’t get lost. And once the meeting is over, the Zoom + Asana integration pulls meeting transcripts and recordings into Asana, so all collaborators and stakeholders can review the meeting as needed.

How do you write a business continuity plan template? .css-i4fobf{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform 200ms ease-in-out;transition:transform 200ms ease-in-out;-webkit-transform:rotateZ(0);-moz-transform:rotateZ(0);-ms-transform:rotateZ(0);transform:rotateZ(0);}

Creating a business continuity plan template is simple. Start by using collaborative work management software like Asana so that your entire team can access the template. From there, create sections for all of the key components of a BCP template—like directly responsible individuals (DRIs), risk assessments, action plans, recovery procedures, crucial business functions, succession plans, internal communication strategies, and alternate business processes.

What are the four P’s of business continuity planning?

When you start filling out the key information in a business continuity plan template, there are four segments that you should consider: people (meaning your employees and potential customers), processes (the steps you need to take to run your business), premises (the physical location or locations of your business), and providers (business partners like suppliers and vendors).

What is a business continuity plan checklist?

A business continuity plan checklist is a list of tasks your team should complete when experiencing an emergency or potential risk. It helps by minimizing the amount of disruptions your business experiences when encountering issues or roadblocks.The easiest way to create this checklist is by using a business continuity plan template. That way, you have the same checklist for every strategy you create.

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Business Continuity Plan Template

Use a business continuity plan to outline how your business will continue to operate in a range of disaster scenarios.

Updated December 18, 2023 Written by Sara Hostelley | Reviewed by Brooke Davis

A business continuity plan outlines the instructions and procedures a business should follow after a natural disaster or disruptive event so it can resume its operations. Events like floods and fires can interrupt your business practices, so it’s essential to have a plan in place to handle these situations and effectively get back to work.

What Is a Business Continuity Plan?

When to use a business continuity plan, benefits of a business continuity plan, elements of a business continuity plan, different types of business continuity plans, activities to complete before writing a business continuity plan, how to write a business continuity plan, business continuity plan sample.

A business continuity plan is a document establishing your organization’s strategies for dealing with a disaster. These procedures help you resume business quickly and reduce downtime and lost revenue.

It covers essential processes like protecting assets, handling human resources issues, and dealing with business partners.

Business Continuity Planning vs. Disaster Recovery Planning

An effective business continuity plan helps a company continue its overall operations after a catastrophe, while a disaster recovery plan focuses on reviving a business’s IT-related functions.

Creating a business continuity plan before you need it can help you prepare for the unexpected. It helps you be proactive so you don’t have to devise a plan amidst a disaster.

Once your continuity plan is in place, you may need to implement it during disasters like:

• Cyberattacks
• Natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, and floods
• Major IT or internet disruptions
• Pandemics or health crises
• Supply chain disruptions
• Man-made disasters or times of social unrest

While a business plan guides your company’s everyday operations, a business continuity plan helps you resume company activities after severe disturbances.

Explore the benefits of a business continuity plan for your company:

Better Decision-Making

A BCP offers a structured framework for employees to make decisions during high-stress situations. Clear protocols and communication methods help your business continuity management team make rational decisions, which can promote confidence and encourage action among employees.

A More Efficient Return to Normal Business Operations

A BCP could make the difference between continued operations and further turmoil in an emergency. Returning to business operations quickly can prevent customers from seeking out competing businesses.

A business continuity plan template makes planning for contingencies in various scenarios easy and addresses the most critical roles and responsibilities necessary for keeping your company running.

Above all, a BCP limits confusion during critical situations and orients employees to the primary focus.

Increased Employee Safety

BCPs prioritize employees’ safety and well-being during emergencies. These plans include guidelines for remote work so employees don’t have to be near the disaster site. They also contain protocols for communicating with one another and evacuating plans in case a disaster happens during work hours.

A Reduction in Lost Time and Revenue

Unmitigated disruptions can financially weaken an organization quickly. Business continuity plans account for all factors necessary for continued operations. The more effort you put into planning, the more time and money you can save.

So, ensure a reliable backup plan for essential systems and enable remote access to customer, product, and company data to keep the revenue stream flowing.

Ability to Quickly Implement IT Fixes

Natural and manufactured disasters typically involve system disruptions. To remain functional, build redundancy into your critical systems. This proactivity will allow you to implement essential fixes to hardware and software assets.

Increased Organizational Resilience

A BCP prepares a company to encounter any challenges it may face. It lets the company’s employees adapt strategies as necessary and work towards continuous improvements, allowing the company to experience long-term success no matter the obstacles it encounters.

Explore some essential elements in a business continuity plan:

• Business Impact Analysis: Determine how a disaster would impact your business’s operations.
• Risk Assessment: Identify the risks that may disrupt your business’s processes.
• Business Continuity Strategy: Detail the steps you’ll take to keep your company running if an interruption occurs. Tailor this strategy to your business’s needs.
• Recovery Team: Include members from across key departments in your recovery team.
• Training: Define training procedures to ensure all members have sufficient knowledge relating to emergency protocols.
• Business Continuity Exercises: Create simulations to practice how your business continuity team would react in an emergency.
• Communication: Establish methods for distributing information internally and externally.
• Backup Locations and Physical Assets: List backup locations for conducting business operations if the primary location isn’t usable. Summarize the equipment you’ll need to continue operations.
• Periodic Review and Recommendations: Include policies for reviewing and updating your plan. Accept recommendations from employees to improve the plan’s efficiency.
• Technology: Describe the processes for retaining access to technology systems. Detail the importance of having emergency power and data backup procedures in place.

While a business continuity plan can cover various recovery strategies for specific events, it prioritizes one event. Explore some of the types of business continuity plans:

• Scope: Emphasize the restoration of normal business activities.
• Objective: To prepare for an unforeseen emergency.
• Scope: Focus on the recovery of IT data, systems, and infrastructure.
• Objective: To reduce downtime and data loss by quickly restoring IT services if they go down.
• Scope: Address communication methods and strategies after a crisis.
• Objective: To provide clear and timely communication to internal and external stakeholders, ensuring the accurate sharing of information.
• Scope: Involve the supply chain’s continuity, including procurement, manufacturing, and distribution.
• Objective: To limit supply chain disruptions and maintain the availability of services and goods.
• Scope: Address the continuity of physical facilities, including warehouses, manufacturing plants, and offices.
• Objective: To ensure the availability of operational facilities or other locations during critical events.
• Scope: Focus on employees’ well-being and safety.
• Objective: To maintain workforce availability and set up guidelines for remote work if possible.
• Scope: Involve continuity plans for key third-party parties, including partners, suppliers, and vendors.
• Objective: To account for the company’s dependencies on external parties and minimize associated disruptions.
• Scope: Address regulatory requirements relating to business continuity.
• Objective: To ensure compliance with industry standards and legal regulations.

Explore some activities to complete before writing a business continuity plan so you can create a more effective document:

1. Decide on a Writing Team

Decide on a team to write the plan. Find employees knowledgeable about various business processes so they can assign tasks accordingly.

Ask for employees’ input to create control and command teams. Appoint several people to be in charge during a crisis so they can have one another’s support. Establish a clear chain of command to minimize arguments and promote efficiency.

Nominate a team leader and a backup team leader for each department within your company. Consider recruiting third-party representatives to assist with coordinating specific activities during disasters.

2. Conduct Critical Function Analysis

Analyze your company’s critical business functions. Determine which functions it can and can’t exist without. This way, you can more easily determine what to prioritize in an emergency.

Determine how losing these functions across different departments might impact external and internal operations.

3. Analyze Potential Risks

Analyze potential risks depending on the nature of your business. Specific threats might be more imminent than others, so you can create visual representations, such as risk maps, to show the relationship between the impact and likelihood of your proposed risks.

From here, you can pinpoint high-priority risks that will require immediate attention.

4. Determine the Plan’s Scope

Determine whether the plan applies to specific departments, one location, or your entire company. Figure out what resources and critical functions you must maintain to successfully implement the plan.

5. Brainstorm Recovery Procedures

Use your risk assessment and critical function analysis to brainstorm how your team should react to a business disruption. Think about the timing for what must occur before, during, and after the business continuity planning process.

Step 1 – Write Your Company’s Information

Write your company’s information, including its name, address, and phone number. Include the name of the person writing the plan and the date you last revised it.

Step 2 – Define the Document’s Purpose

Define the document’s purpose, restating that the document is to establish procedures for the execution and recovery of business activities for your specific company. Check off the specific events you want to plan for.

Step 3 – Outline the Applicability

Clarify the applicability of the document. State which operations the document applies to, including the operation’s name, description, and impact on the business.

Step 4 – Define the Recovery Strategies

Define the recovery strategies for all the events you’ve outlined. Explain the recovery procedure and resource requirements for each event, such as a natural disaster, fire, epidemic, pandemic, technical issue, cyberattack, supply chain disruption, business site disruption, labor strike, or civil unrest.

Step 5 – Name Your Recovery Team

Name your recovery team, including a team and an alternate team lead. These individuals will restore and maintain business continuity and ensure the document’s compliant execution. Include each member’s name, role, email, phone number, and responsibilities.

Step 6 – Detail Processes for Vendor Communication

Designate a person who will be responsible for contacting vendors and partners. This way, external parties key to the business’s functions will know what’s going on and the plan for continued operation.

Step 7 – Name an Internal Communicator

Name an internal communicator, providing their name, email, phone number, and roles within the organization. This person will provide all employees with business-wide updates as the appropriate teams implement the continuity plan.

Step 8 – Describe Relocation Procedures

Describe relocation procedures, including backup offices and methods for obtaining equipment and assets for relevant business activities. Provide an estimated timeline for a transition back to normal operations.

Step 9 – Write Testing Procedures

Write testing procedures to occasionally examine the BCP’s effectiveness. This way, the company can make updates to improve the plan’s effectiveness.

Step 10 – Outline Deactivation Procedures

Outline deactivation procedures so your team knows when your company has officially restored its normal operations.

Step 11 – Provide Exceptions

Write exceptions so your team knows when the business continuity plan doesn’t apply. For example, the plan might not apply if business operations can restore themselves within a certain number of hours.

Download a business continuity plan template below in PDF or Word format:

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Business Continuity Plan

A business continuity plan (BCP) is an essential business document that outlines how a business will continue its critical functions during and after an emergency event or disruption in business.

Emergency events can also include natural disasters, workplace violence, utility failures, cyber-attacks, supply shortages, economic downturns, or any event that will result in the disruption of business processes.

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The COVID-19 Pandemic:

The COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic is a real-world example of an emergency situation in which a business continuity plan should be instituted.

Business Continuity Plan Template Download

Download this business continuity plan template in MS Word format and start using it straight away.

Why is it Important To Have a Business Continuity Plan?

In times of crisis, having a business continuity plan in place will ensure your business is able to function, before, during, and after an emergency event.

A BCP will clearly outline the people and procedures involved in running your business when the worst happens. A Busines Continuity Plan is beneficial because:

• It is required by many business regulators, investors, and stakeholders.
• It provides a sense of security for managers and staff.
• It will allow your business to provide reasonable service to your customers during and after an emergency.
• It will allow you to preserve your revenue stream and your reputation.
• It can provide additional insight into your organization.

What Should Be Included In A Business Continuity Plan:

Business continuity plans are as varied and complex as businesses themselves. Every plan is different and should be based on the needs of your company and your customers. Here are a few general examples of what a BCP should include:

• The scope and purpose of your plan.
• Your plan's goals and objectives.
• A comprehensive list of tasks required to keep your operations going.
• The roles and responsibilities of your BCM team and your staff.
• The contact information for management and key BCM staff.
• Maintenance protocols for your plan.
• Information about site and data backups.
• Information on where to go in an emergency.
• Procedures to coordinate with emergency personnel.

How to Build a Business Continuity Plan:

A step-by-step guide to creating a business continuity plan.

Identify the scope of your plan.

Perform a regulatory review..

Before you create your business continuity plan, first consider the expectations and regularity standards that come from external stakeholders including investors, external partners, and auditors.

Identify the objectives of your plan.

When creating a comprehensive business continuity plan, a key step is to identify the objectives of your plan and then set goals accordingly. Here you should be considering how detailed your plan should be and which departments and staff members should be involved.

Define the outcome of your plan.

When creating the scope of your plan, you should also define the successful outcome of your plan and which milestones should be tracked during an emergency.

Form the business continuity management team.

Decide on the size of your team..

The business continuity management team is responsible for implementing and executing your BCP. The size of your team is dependent on the size of your company and the way in which you plan on rolling out your program.

Identify your key business areas and critical functions.

Complete a risk assessment..

The next step is to perform a detailed risk assessment on your company. A risk assessment allows you to understand the physical, financial, reputational, and operational risks to your company should a major disruption occur.

Have your team create a detailed list of threats and risks that would impact your business and rate them according to the likelihood of occurrence and severity. Examples of risks and exposures include:

• Natural disasters.
• Global pandemics.
• Staffing shortages.
• Cyber attacks.
• Single point disruptions.
• Disruptions to the supply chain.
• Political instability.

Conduct a business impact analysis.

A business impact analysis will help you identify your business's core needs and determine the potential impact resulting from the disruption of business. Examples of impacts to consider include:

• Increase in customer dissatisfaction.
• Damage to company reputation.
• Loss of sales or income.
• Loss of equipment or data.
• Delay or loss of new business.
• Regulatory fines.

Identify your business processes and determine which would cause the most damage to the company if they were to fail. Classify each of these functions or processes as either:

Find out which business objectives they support, how often they occur, which departments they affect, and what other aspects of the business are dependent on these to function? Your BIA report should document the potential impact resulting from business disruptions and provide information that can be used in your recovery strategies.

Create an incident response plan.

Outline your operations plan..

This should be the most comprehensive section of your business continuity plan. You can break down operations activities into prevention strategies, response strategies, and recovery strategies.

Come up with prevention strategies.

In this section, you should detail any preventative measures that should be taken before a disruption occurs. This may include creating remote work solutions for your employees, having backup utility providers, alternative network resources, data backups, and server backups.

Detail response strategies.

Response strategies are needed when there is an emergency or sudden disruption of business. This section should detail what each member of your business continuity team should do in the event of an emergency. This includes evacuation procedures, safety protocols, and staff communications.

Plan your recovery strategies.

Recovery strategies ensure that critical business processes are restored after an emergency event or major disruption in business. Your plan should have a detailed description of the actions necessary to keep your business functional until all personal, systems, and facilities are operational again.

Develop a training curriculum.

Implement a training curriculum..

Once your business continuity plan is complete, it is important to implement a training curriculum for your business continuity management team and your company employees. Training should include a basic overview of your BCP as well as relevant and tactical exercises designed to test your continuity procedures.

It may be worth staging a mock emergency to establish the efficacy of your plan and highlight areas of improvement.

Conduct annual reviews.

Review and update your plan..

As your business grows and changes so should your business continuity plan. It is important to conduct annual reviews of your BCP to ensure that it aligns with your current processes and requirements. Updates should be made to evacuation procedures, staff contacts, and communication methods as needed.

Business Continuity Management Services:

For larger businesses, it may be worth employing the services of a business continuity consulting and management company to review your BCP. These services may include:

• A comprehensive assessment of your current business continuity plan.
• Gap analysis.
• Recommendations and long-term planning.
• Annual updates.
• Training exercises.

Layoff Letter Due to COVID-19 (Coronavirus)

What is a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan is a document detailing how your business will continue to function during an emergency or major disruption of business.

What is the primary goal of business continuity planning?

To minimize the damage to your business in the event of an emergency or disruption of business.

What does a business continuity plan typically include?

• The scope, purpose, and policy of your plan.

Is business continuity the same as disaster recovery?

No, disaster recovery is part of a business continuity plan which is designed to ensure that your business stays functional before, during, and after an emergency. Disaster recovery focuses on restoring operations after a major disruption in business.

When should I update a business continuity plan?

Your business continuity plan should be reviewed and updated annually or whenever you make major changes to your production processes.

Related Articles:

Disaster recovery plan, recruiting strategies, life-sustaining businesses, what is full life cycle recruiting, what is strategic staffing.

Free Business Continuity Policy Samples and Template

By Andy Marker | February 11, 2021 (updated August 2, 2021)

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Business continuity planning is essential for organizations preparing for a crisis, using a business continuity policy document as a guide. Find steps on how to write a business continuity policy, a free template, and expert advice. 

Included on this page, you’ll learn what a business continuity policy is and how a business continuity policy applies in a pandemic . Find policy statement samples and a simple downloadable business continuity template .

What Is a Business Continuity Policy?

A business continuity policy provides high-level guidelines a company uses to ensure it can run in a crisis and keep addressing new risks. Each company’s policy is unique. To be successful, a policy needs the support of top leadership. 

“The policy sets out that a company knows it cannot just sail through the good times,” explains Alex Fullick, General Manager of business continuity consultancy Stone Road Inc . “It knows it has to be able to respond to the bad times to maintain client satisfaction. A policy outlines that, first of all, a company is dedicated to ensuring employee safety and protecting shareholders, stakeholders, and partners. A policy shows that a company will prepare for, respond to, and recover from any adverse situations that it encounters to ensure public safety and employee safety.”

Top leadership and the business continuity planning committee shape the policy. The policy writers specify the business continuity plan's purpose. They also describe what facilities and processes the business continuity plan will cover. 

The policy specifies key personnel who will administer the plan and outlines the role of staff in the continuity system. A business continuity policy also notes any legal, regulatory, or contractual obligations, as well as exclusions, such as service level agreements, that a company must maintain in all circumstances. Learn more about business continuity management from our article on business continuity planning . 

The document defines how the company communicates to staff that the organization is implementing a business continuity management system and has the endorsement of the C-level. 

Today, in the era of social media, reputation is everything. “If you're not protecting your brand, it's very easy for someone to suddenly start sending off messages in social media saying, no, they're not doing this, they're not doing that. It comes down to the brand. If you do things right, the policy protects the brand,” says Fullick.

The procedures in the business continuity plan puts the policy into action. Together both documents emphasize these elements:

• Contingency Planning: A company makes a proactive effort to foresee possible events and plan how to deal with them. This planning mostly addresses events that are negative but can also be positive. Contingency planning is different from crisis management , which is how a company reacts to an incident. 
• Recovery: This step describes the efforts of a company to save and restart critical processes after an incident. A recovery approach also dictates acceptable levels of service after a disruption.
• Resilience: This concept refers to a company’s ability to provide critical products and services during and after a crisis. Resilience includes protecting staff, other resources, and the brand. 

Large companies usually have a business continuity policy; small companies often don’t. “I've worked for a medium-sized company, and there wasn't a documented policy,” says Fullick. “I worked for a large company that had a documented policy that the president looked at every year. In reality, he probably just signed it and added a new date.” 

A written policy is mandatory for any business pursuing ISO 22301 certification. For Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 compliance, which governs how service providers manage data to ensure privacy, you need documented business continuity and disaster recovery plans. See our article to learn more about ISO 22301 . 

Policy also does not exist on its own. “I use the image of a three-legged stool,” explains Mike Semel, President and Chief Compliance Officer of Semel Consulting . “A three-legged stool can't stand without all of its legs. Take away a leg, it's going to fall. If you have a policy, then you have to back it up with procedures and back the procedures up with evidence that you're following them. That’s the hardest and most expensive part.” Learn more about writing procedures and work instructions in our article.

Business Continuity Policy in a Pandemic

Business continuity policy templates can save you time when writing a policy. Editing an existing document takes less effort than formatting a new one and serves as a reminder to add key information. 

Use our free downloadable business continuity policy template available in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. The document contains all the sections you might need for a policy document, along with a customizable header block and confidentiality label.

Download Simple Business Continuity Policy Template

Microsoft Word | Google Docs | Smartsheet

For other most useful free, downloadable business continuity plan (BCP) templates please read our  "Free Business Continuity Plan Templates"  article.

How to Write a Business Continuity Policy

When drafting a business continuity plan , a company must write a business continuity policy document. The policy document outlines requirements for developing the business continuity plan.

Use concise, simple words when writing a business continuity policy. Write in the third person using “he,” “she,” and “it.” If possible, avoid adding information that may quickly go out of date. Consult good examples of straightforward policies for reference. (We provide examples of policy statements later in this article).

Step by Step: Writing a Business Continuity Policy

Follow this procedure to prepare your business continuity policy:

• Write the Policy Statement The statement describes the aim of the policy. Directors or managers often sign the document. “In most cases I’ve been associated with [for any type of policy document], about 80 percent of the statement is written at the beginning,” says Cox. “After there’s been some discussion, often after completing a risk analysis, there are some modifications and expansions on the original statement.” Learn more about business continuity policy statements later in this article.
• Conduct the Risk Assessment and BIA A business impact analysis (BIA) determines the financial and functional impact of disruption and reveals key processes and information about recovery time objectives. Conduct a risk assessment to determine and rank threats and risks. Read our guide to learn how to write a BIA. A business continuity policy is a tactical tool, but it must be grounded in company strategy, which comes from senior management (senior management could be an executive in a corporation or the owner in a small business). Mike Semel gives the example of an accounting firm with employees who thought their recovery time objective (RTO) was eight business hours. The managing partner said the company couldn’t possibly afford to recover so quickly and determined it was cheaper to pay any fees clients incurred from late filings. Thus, it’s management’s job to determine risk tolerance. Semel explains further that companies often guess at RTO without a full understanding of what the number really means. For example, if power goes out, unless you can fire up a generator, your recovery must wait on power being restored. Thus, an eight-hour RTO clock doesn’t begin until power is restored. “The problem with RTO is that it's usually like a hope or a wish or a guess,” he says. “The biggest flaw when it comes to recovering systems is that nobody tests them adequately. They do the backups. Every day, they get the message that the backup is successful. But they don't test recovering from the backup and trying to operate the business. Then they go to recover in a disaster, and instead of eight hours, let's say it takes 14 hours. If the policy says it should take eight hours, they either have to change the policy to say 14 hours, or they have to change the process to get it down to eight hours.” When describing scope and recovery parameters in a policy, also consider that the timing of a disruption makes a difference. “A disaster the day before payday is completely different from a disaster the day after payday. In accounting firms, a disaster a week before tax day is different from a disaster the week after. Those are the things that people don't always think through,” shares Semel.
• Determine Your Strategy for Business Continuity A business continuity strategy provides a high-level view of what recovery and continuity mean for a company. Consider the scope, approaches, and recovery timelines.
• Write the Policy Document the scope, key business areas and functions as determined by the BIA, key roles, and the general approach to continuity. 
• Secure Stakeholders’ Review for Both the Policy Statement and the Document If you haven’t included them already on your writing team, be sure to get input from the CISO, CTO, and CIO, as well as comments from important third parties.
• Get Executive Endorsement of the Policy Statement Obtaining senior sponsorship will set your business continuity planning on the path to success. 
• Promote the Policy Share the policy with employees and interested third parties. Promotion can be as simple as posting the statement on bulletin boards where people gather frequently.

Finally, although every business has unique needs, brevity is indeed the soul of wit for business continuity policies. “If a policy is 20, 30 pages, that means nothing, because that’s too much detail, which means too much fluff,” explains Fullick. “Policies must be short and simple: This is what it is, this is why we're doing it, and this is everyone's part in it.”

Common Structure of a Business Continuity Policy

Knowing the typical format of a policy frees you to focus on the content of the document. Here is an example of a business continuity policy format:

Header Block: Depending on your company’s style, you might need to include a header block on the policy. A header block includes the policy holder, policy signatory, policy date, review cycle, and version control details.

Introduction: Policy documents might or might not include an introduction. The introduction explains why a business continuity policy is important to the organization and the fundamental reasons for the policy.

Policy Statement: The policy statement might be one paragraph or an entire page. The statement describes the purpose and aims of the business continuity policy. The statement might also be called an aim or the purpose. In some organizations, the managing director or another officer signs and dates the statement page.

Definitions: Your industry might use specialized terminology that needs clarification. Definitions can also help explain the business continuity system’s scope. 

Purpose and Scope: The scope section describes the facilities, processes, and activities the policy covers. “The scope tells you what to worry about. For example, ‘We’re only worrying about our main office in Mississauga. That’s the one we have to make sure is always running 24/7,’” Fullick explains.

Policy Personnel: This section lists the individuals or roles who review, approve, and enact the policy. Those responsible for policy administration are also responsible for ensuring compliance.

Compliance: The compliance area describes the requirement for testing to verify that the business continuity plans and activities adhere to the policy. 

Consequences for Non-Compliance: Detail the results of not conforming to the policy. 

Confidentiality Level: The confidentiality level describes who may see the document. This label usually appears in the header or footer of each page of the policy. Outside of government, businesses typically use three confidentiality levels: confidential, wherein only management can read it; restricted, wherein only company employees can read it; and public, when anyone can read it. 

References and Resources: When your business continuity planning is complex, you might have a suite of policies and plans. You might also refer to legal or regulatory documents that affect business continuity policy. 

Appendixes: In some cases, it makes sense to attach documents, charts, or drawings to a policy.

Business Continuity Management Policy Statement Examples

A business continuity policy statement outlines the broad goals of a company’s business continuity management program. The statement sets out the scope of efforts and outlines staff roles and duties for carrying out the continuity plan.

Top leadership should sign and endorse the statement, and you should communicate the policy to all employees. A statement might include the following:

• Details on the purpose and scope of the policy.
• A clear explanation of the framework of the organization’s business continuity management program.
• Details on who within the organization is responsible for implementing the policy.
• Details on how the organization will monitor its compliance with the policy.

In these examples of real policy statements, note the different formats and locations of the statement within the policy document:

Healthcare Providers

This healthcare business continuity policy example calls the statement an aim , but it serves the same purpose as a policy statement. Here’s an example: 

Greenwich Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG)

Commercial Company

Business continuity policy statements for commercial organizations tend to specify an expected time to resume service. Here’s an example: 

Compass Disability Services

Universities

These business continuity management policy statements might begin with a purpose, which can help you to understand business continuity systems. Universities might incorporate objectives and scope. See these examples:

• Monash University
• Sheffield University

City Government

A statement for a city’s business continuity policy outlines what continuity planning aims to accomplish for the city. Here’s an example:

Leicester, UK City Government

Business Continuity Policy Best Practices

Keep your policy simple and remember to focus on creating attainable continuity goals. Follow these best practices to enhance your business continuity policy preparation experience:

• Bring in expert help when needed. Creating a policy and business continuity system requires a concerted level of effort.
• Understand your key assets and processes.
• Recognize the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity. 
• Consider third-party risks. Knowledge of third-party risks is especially important for regulated industries because you are liable, even if your data is stored offsite on infrastructure you don’t own.
• Promote transparency and visibility. “Once you have a policy, make it visible to all staff. Be sure to communicate the policy — a detailed policy with extensive resources is useless if staff don’t know it exists,” advises Alex Fullick.

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Home » Organizational Change » An Easy-to-Use Business Continuity Plan Sample and Template

An Easy-to-Use Business Continuity Plan Sample and Template

A business continuity plan sample template is a must-have tool for anyone developing a business continuity plan. 

In this article, we’ll provide a detailed sample template that can be used and modified as needed, regardless of the type of disruption being addressed.

Having a template on hand can greatly simplify the creation of new business continuity plans, as well as emergency response plans, disaster recovery plans, and other continuity plans.

An Easy-to-Use Business Continuity Plan Sample Template

Continuity plans will vary in length and complexity, depending on the organization’s scale, its industry, and its needs. 

However, the following outline can be customized and applied to a wide variety of circumstances. Each section covered below includes a short description of the section, as well as a list of specific points to address.

General Information

Every business continuity plan should include a section detailing general information about the plan and its purpose. 

Here are a few items to cover:

• General recovery information, such as contact information for continuity coordinators, recovery site information, and critical dependencies affected by disruptions
• Types of disruptions, disasters, or emergencies that the continuity plan would address
• General recovery strategies, which should first aim to protect people, then business processes and assets
• Which business functions should be recovered, recovery sites, and recovery time frames

This section should only aim to provide a brief summary of the plan, without exploring any of the actual processes or procedures. 

Training and Exercises

A business continuity team will be responsible for the execution of the plan. But change readiness is essential – in order to implement the plan properly, they will need to receive the proper training.

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This section will describe that training in detail, including:

• The specific goals of the training efforts
• The types of training that teams will receive
• Which team members will receive which training
• When training should be conducted and updated
• Exercises, drills, and simulations that will offer hands-on practice

Training should occur on a regular basis, in order to ensure that business continuity team members can respond competently and effectively if the plan is executed. Live exercises and drills can be used to simulate disruptions and give team members the chance to demonstrate their abilities. 

Plan Activation Process

This section outlines the actual sequence of actions that will occur at the outset of the continuity plan. 

In this section, it is useful to include:

• Notification checklists that describe a series of parties to contact at the outset of a response
• Business continuity team members’ responsibilities 
• Declaration policies and procedures that describe guidelines for how disruptions will be communicated, the content of those communications, and so forth

Once these items have been completed and the plan has been activated, it is time to begin the core activities associated with this particular continuity plan. 

Recovery and Restoration Procedures

Not every business continuity plan will have the same aim or purpose, though many revolve around disaster mitigation and recovery. 

In such cases, restoration and recovery would be the primary aim of the continuity plan, which would include activities such as:

• General recovery activities and tasks, as well as the sequence of these tasks and who will be performing them
• Data retrieval procedures that will be conducted during certain types of IT disruptions
• Restoration and reconstruction procedures that will aim to rebuild systems and processes
• Relocation or remote working procedures that can be implemented during natural disasters or other disruptions that impact a workplace

Since these actions are the primary effort that will drive every business continuity effort, it may be tempting to create plans that consist only of these procedures. 

However, it is important to realize that every other section of the continuity plan is equally important – without the proper training, for instance, business continuity teams won’t actually be able to implement the plan successfully. 

Contact Lists

Since business continuity plans should be implemented rapidly, it is important to have contact lists and details on hand. 

These lists can include telephone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, and other contact details for…

• Business continuity team members
• Government agencies
• Vendors and business partners

Having all of this information will save valuable time and ensure that business teams spend time only on the most important recovery and restoration activities, rather than spending that time searching for and compiling contact details.

Additional Information

An appendix can include other relevant information, such as:

• Other related business continuity plans, such as emergency response plans and continuity plans that cover other types of disruptions
• Documents and resources required for the successful implementation of the plan
• Required forms and reports, such as status reports, communication templates, and expense logs

The proper implementation of recovery and restoration plans can make a big difference in the outcomes and the effectiveness of those efforts. Therefore, the more detail that can be included, the better. 

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How to write a business continuity plan template

To avoid the common pitfalls associated with growing a successful business, you’ll need to come up with a long-term plan. A business continuity plan template can help you anticipate and avoid disruptions to your company.

Unanticipated threats can wipe out your assets, while risky courses of action can lead to disastrous results. Take the pandemic as an example, which wrought havoc on companies’ plans for growth. In the first year, 43% of businesses temporarily closed , something few could have anticipated.

In this article, we’ll explore why you need a business continuity plan template to help you stay on steady footing, even if the ground beneath you shakes.

Get the template

What is a business continuity plan template?

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a roadmap for long-term success that factors in common pitfalls and risks. A business continuity plan template ensures that you dot your Is and cross your Ts, and craft a reliable plan to handle unexpected events or disasters.

The template will include fields for filling in information on your current resources, recovery procedures when you face critical setbacks, and a list of personnel responsible for addressing such issues.

The primary purpose of business continuity management is to analyze the current status of your company and its state of preparedness for unexpected threats. With it, senior management can find any weak spots in the business and proactively identify solutions to problems that could hinder progress toward your goals. Of course, there are other reasons you’d benefit from this template.

Why use a business continuity plan template?

Reiterating on the above, the main function of the business continuity plans template is to provide a framework for addressing any problems that may arise in various departments and areas of the business.

Without a plan for dealing with roadblocks, your business’s growth can be stunted, or worse, screech to a halt. All it takes is a few missteps or misguided risks to steer your company off course. 90% of small businesses fail within a single year if they can’t resume full operations following an unexpected disaster.

Don’t confuse a BCP with a disaster recovery plan. A BCP doesn’t just outline what to do in case of emergencies, but it presents ideas for recovering full functionality within the business to minimize the impact on growth.

Take your company’s sensitive data as an example. Relying solely on backups to external servers or hard drives could be risky. In your BCP template, you’ll want to detail how you can protect and manage your data in the event of a breach or severe weather conditions. For instance, a hybrid approach, using both a cloud-based solution and a private server, could afford you extra data security and safety.

There were 3,950 confirmed data breaches in 2020 alone, which highlights the dangers of ignoring your data security. The faster you can get back on your feet and recover from cyberthreats or unforeseen events, the easier it’ll be to hold onto your cutting edge and stay a step ahead of the competition.

Those are the benefits in theory, but let’s take a look at specific cases where BCP templates can help.

What are examples of business continuity plan templates?

Depending on your needs, these business continuity templates can provide a little extra inspiration to get started.

Risk assessment template for business continuity

Use a risk assessment table to calculate whether various weather conditions or other events could impact your day-to-day operations. Your business continuity management team could use resources such as this to identify potential threats—however unlikely —to make sure that the company isn’t caught off guard.

( Image Source )

While nobody could have predicted the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Katrina, a rigorous risk assessment system ensures that you have most bases covered, including natural disasters.

Even if your headquarters is sheltered from severe weather conditions, there may be secondary offices or physical data servers in high-risk areas. As such, it’s important to factor in all of your infrastructure to avoid getting blindsided.

Alternate site evaluation template

If you have employees working from home or away from your primary place of work, you can use an alternate site evaluation table to evaluate the possible risks. Have your employees fill out a table like this one so that you have all the relevant contact information on your books in case of an emergency.

This information can help you better understand your employees’ work arrangements and troubleshoot any issues should they come up.

BCP committee table template

Use a simple BCP committee table to determine member’s roles and responsibilities. For each member, you can fill out contact information, along with a list of the main duties they are required to carry out.

This will make it easy for the committee members to coordinate for meetings and have a clear action plan for what to do next.

Want a template that lets you do all of this in one document? monday.com has just what the doctor ordered.

monday.com’s business continuity plan template

On the monday.com business continuity plan template, you’ll be able to enter data such as committee member contact details, disaster recovery action plans, and evacuation information.

The template covers all bases regarding potential threats you could encounter as you grow your business. With it, you’ll be able to keep all the information in a single place and enter it in an easy-to-digest way to share with your employees.

And that’s not all. With monday.com Work OS, your employees can easily share and collaborate on tables and forms, so you can ask for input regarding secondary places of work and contact information. Plus, managers can access this information from anywhere, allowing them to see crucial details at a glance for better preparation.

Part of business continuity planning is ensuring your sensitive data is secure, so you’ll appreciate that monday.com protects your information with permission-based access. Only those in the BCP committee will be privy to the plans unless you wish to grant access to other employees.

If you want to expand beyond the BCP and really detail how you’ll deal with potential disasters and risks, we’ve got a few templates for you.

Related templates from monday.com

Let’s take a look at a few templates that are related to a business continuity plan template.

Disaster recovery template

A Disaster Recovery Template falls under the scope of the business continuity plan committee. It’s just what it sounds like: a comprehensive plan for necessary actions if disaster strikes. More specifically, the plan should inform your approach for getting systems back online when they go down.

In this disaster recovery template, you can include everything from cyber-attacks and data breaches to worldwide pandemics or natural disasters. You can integrate these reports into your overall BCP to get a comprehensive overview of your recovery plans.

Operating functions template

An operating functions template gives you an idea of how you can cut costs in various processes and workflows. It can also inform how you can implement more sustainable business practices and initiatives.

Check out these different operations templates from monday.com that can be used with the BCP template to outline potential risks associated with new initiatives and suggested changes to work processes.

Program risk register

The Program Risk Register Template is for the early-stage process of identifying and evaluating potential risks to your business. It complements the business continuity plan template well — you can focus on valid, severe, likely risks in your BCP, and have a separate table for risks of all likelihoods and potential levels of impact.

FAQs about business continuity plan templates

How do you write a business continuity plan.

You can write a business continuity plan by first listing the various departments of your company and what risks or threats they might face. From there, you can assess the likelihood of these threats coming to fruition. Once you have an idea of the probability of the various threats to your company, you can prioritize them.

With a prioritized list, you can start with the most pressing threat and proactively brainstorm what actions you could take if it were to arise. The purpose of the BCP is to shield your company against anything that could hinder your progress. Coming up with potential solutions for addressing hypothetical problems can prepare you for real ones in the future.

What is a small business continuity plan?

A small business continuity plan is a document that details potential risks and threats to a small business. It’s well worth creating such a document as a small business owner, as it can save you from disaster as you strive to scale the company.

For small businesses, any hitch can prove disastrous. 38.8% of US-based small businesses were affected by supply chain issues in 2021, which, for some, would have impeded growth significantly. Over-reliance on foreign suppliers could be an example of an unnecessary risk that, without being addressed, could spell disaster for a small business.

With the business continuity plan in place, you can protect your business in its most vulnerable state of growth. The plan forces you to think laterally about the threats that could sink your business. That way, you can make necessary course corrections and increase your chances of long-term survival.

What is an example of a business continuity plan?

An example of a business continuity plan is to plan out how you’ll protect your app’s uptime in the event something happens to one data center: for example, running a clone in AWS you can always fall back on.

What are the 3 elements of business continuity?

The three most vital elements within business continuity are resilience, recovery, and contingency.

• Resilience: how you’ll make it as hard as possible for critical functions to fail.
• Recovery: how you’ll get back to normal operations if disaster strikes.
• Contingency: what you’ll do if plan A for recovery fails.
• Project risk management

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Can your company operate under challenging circumstances? Establish a business continuity plan, so you know the answer is yes.

Business disruption costs your company money. It can result in lost revenues and extra expenses. The worst part is that potential threats can come anytime and anywhere. A natural disaster or sudden illness can leave your company without a leader, supplier, or office space. A business continuity plan (BCP) ensures your organization can function during a crisis.

In 2020, more than 50% of companies worldwide didn’t have a business continuity plan. While many have since implemented one, others lag behind. Learn what a BCP is, how it benefits your company, and how to start.

What is a business continuity plan, and who needs one?

A business continuity plan is a written document that outlines the steps your organization takes during an emergency. On a basic level, your BCP explains who handles essential business operations and highlights time-sensitive tasks. You assign each person a role and describe operational processes so that you can fill empty positions with another team member or new employee as needed. It should be updated regularly and accessible to all staff in digital and paper forms.

All companies benefit from having a business continuity plan, even solo entities. After all, if you are a solopreneur, who will communicate with your clients if you can’t? Also, corporations in some industries must create a BCP. For instance, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) requires member firms to keep plans according to Rule 4370 .

[ Read more: 5 Types of Organizational Structures for Small Business ]

Core components of business continuity plans

Although business continuity plans vary according to industry and company size, most include similar sections. A solopreneur without employees will have a less extensive guide than an entrepreneur with multiple locations and a large staff.

Your business continuity plan may include the following:

• A list of roles and responsibilities.
• Communication protocols for staff, vendors, and customers.
• An outline of critical functions like payroll and revenue operations.
• Your strategy for assessing risks, testing your plan, and updating it.

Assessing threats and having an actionable plan gives your company a competitive edge.

Business continuity vs. disaster recovery

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) helps your company move forward after an incident. It’s focused on returning to business as normal. In contrast, a business continuity plan prioritizes keeping your store open and running regardless of the circumstances. A DRP is often part of a more extensive business continuity plan; alternatively, it can be a stand-alone document. The key to creating a resilient business is having both strategies in place.

[ Read more: How to Write an Emergency Preparedness Plan ]

How small businesses benefit from having a BCP

Assessing threats and having an actionable plan gives your company a competitive edge. It ensures that you’re prepared to handle anything that comes your way while reassuring your customers, employees, and suppliers that your business will remain open during trying times.

Here are a few ways business continuity planning benefits your company:

• Increases organizational awareness: Going through the planning process can alert you to insurance issues, unknown risks, or supply chain concerns . It also encourages your staff to take their roles seriously and understand what’s expected of them.
• Reduces financial risks: Having strategies to resolve employee, supply chain, or location problems can decrease downtime, allowing you to continue to generate revenue during an emergency.
• Prevents customer dissatisfaction: Communication issues and business disruption can lead to clients turning to your competitors. Remaining operational means you can fully support customers in their time of need.
• Improves employee relations: Instability can lower worker retention rates. A BCP shows your staff how and when you will communicate during a crisis. Also, you can engage them during the process to demonstrate their importance to your small business.

Getting started: BCP tips and resources

Ready.gov provides top-notch resources to help you throughout the business continuity planning process. Along with guides and templates, you can view training and testing information or learn how to complete a risk assessment.

Check out free business continuity plan templates from the following agencies:

• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
• Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

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Create your business continuity plan (with free template)

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As a small business owner you may have been alarmed by the events and uncertainty of the past few years. Since COVID first hit, a barrage of tough trading conditions has seen countless businesses forced into administration or even company liquidation .

With a background of Brexit, pandemics, lockdowns, the Great Resignation, an in-and-out-and-in-again recession, and other current stressors – you will need a clear plan in place to keep operations running smoothly in these uncertain times – one that focuses on the continuity, survival and durability of your small business. That’s where a Business Continuity Plan can be essential.

You may have heard about Business Continuity Plans (BCPs), but don’t know exactly what they are or how to go about creating one. Whilst many small businesses have insurances in place, far less know they need a BCP or some kind of framework to deal with unexpected or unpredictable events.

We’ll guide you through the process here, explaining the key considerations and elements. By the end of this article you’ll know how to write a thorough and workable BCP, using the free template provided to get started .

In this article, we will cover:

What is a business continuity plan, why is a business continuity plan important.

• How to Create A Business Continuity Plan

Next Steps: Testing and Reviewing Your Plan

Our below guide will give you detailed advice on how to write a quality BCP.

But first, you need to know what to include – and that’s where a high quality template can help.

We recommend using the free clickup.com BCP template to ensure nothing gets missed. Every step involved in the business continuity plan – coordinating your emergency response, forming your strategy to get back up and running and communicating with your customers – is already mapped out for you, ready to be filled in with your details.

We recommend creating an account with Clickup to use this free template – doing so means you may be able to keep your business protected financially and otherwise in the event of an emergency. You can see the template below, or click to try it for yourself by signing up to Clickup.

Business continuity is the ability of an organisation to continue production and delivery to an acceptable standard following a disruptive incident. A Business Continuity Plan details the steps and strategies to how you intend to do that.

Your Business Continuity Plan can take many different forms – a paper document that you could store away in a filing cabinet, or a digital document that you store on your computer (or multiple if you want to be really safe).

Ultimately it is the emergency strategy you use if you want to get your business on track in terms of regaining customers (and to avoid losing them to competitors) from supply chain issues, for example, to fixing physical damage to products or property, recovering from any losses of particularly significant people, and keeping the business from fully having to close down due to significant negative events.

You would normally use it as soon as you possibly can after said negative events to mitigate as much damage (whether physical or representational) as you can. This would also inspire confidence about you to your team and show the leadership needed to deal with stressful situations when it’s most needed.

The state of the world leaves much to be desired right now. We are seeing such unprecedented upheavals in almost every sector of everyday life – from the cost of living, to post-pandemic effects, to rising electricity prices and other forms of inflation – that Collins Dictionary chose “Permacrisis” as their 2022 word of the year.

“Permacrisis” perfectly encapsulates the ‘survival mode’ most small business owners are in right now . But having a Business Continuity Plan ensures that your company and its assets are protected and are able to function quickly in the event of a disaster – so that the business survives with as little damage as possible (financial or otherwise).

Your business continuity plan should detail such important aspects such as:

• Coordinating an emergency response
• Dealing with damaged infrastructure
• Timescales for getting systems back up and running
• Strategies for reassuring customers

How to Create a Business Continuity Plan

We know you already have a lot on your plate right now, and creating a new plan may seem like a lot of work with multiple considerations and factors – but not to worry. A solid plan is worth it, as it can be an essential asset for years to come, and we’re here to walk you through making one.

(We’re also assuming you already have your business plan in place, but if not, we also have a guide that will give you detailed advice on how to write a quality business plan here.)

Step 1: What are your potential risks and impact?

• Consider all the potential risks to your company. There are external risks (for example power cuts, natural disasters, cyber attacks and other things that are out of your control for the most part), and internal risks (for example sudden cash-flow issues, tough sales months or losing key staff).
• What parts of the business could they affect? The issues could affect anything from your premises, people, stock and equipment, operations and processes, to technology.
• What could the impact be? You could for example experience a loss of sales and income, increased expenses, decreased customer satisfaction and loyalty, delayed service delivery, poor product quality, or regulatory fines.

Let’s put it together: If you owned a hair salon and a competitor opened up next door .(potential risk), it would affect the volume of potential customers (part of business affected) and there may be a loss of sales (business impact).

Step 2: What are your critical business functions?

• A critical business function is a process that must be restored in the event of a disruption to protect the business and keep meeting expectations (up to the standards of shareholders, for example). A good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system would help with this process, and you can find some of the best CRM for small businesses here .
• A few different business functions that exist are paperwork, employees, and production for example .
• Using paperwork that was at risk of a fire as an example, a way to mitigate this potential risk would be to have multiple backups , in different locations and the responsibility of different people in the business.

Step 3: Who holds the key roles and responsibilities?

It’s important to consider the key roles and responsibilities in your business because that way, the right information can get to the right people in a streamlined way and issues can be resolved by the right people quickly.

These may include:

• Internal staff (sales leaders, accountants, client managers etc)
• External key players (contractors and service providers, suppliers and distributors, IT consultants, utility companies etc)
• It’s important to have a list of key people (with their documented roles), and other important contacts, as well as clear instructions that clarify their responsibilities in an emergency situation.

Let’s put it together: If there was a security breach in a tech company, the customer service department (internal staff) would need to be alerted who could send out a reassuring email to customers. Next, a call would need to be made to an IT consultant to fix the issue (external key players). At the same time, a senior manager for example (key people) could also send out a message to shareholders to clear up and clarify any incorrect information showing on systems.

Step 4: What is your communication plan?

• Who needs to be contacted: in the event of a disruption or emergency? Some examples may include employees, customers, clients, or suppliers.
• How will you communicate with them: Depending on the severity of the situation and also taking into consideration the tone of your company brand and the mediums your customer base use most, you could use social media, press releases, or an email newsletter for example.
• What will the tone be? The tone can be serious, reassuring, optimistic or anything else you feel most accurately serves the situation, and that would be on brand for your company.
• Test your plan. It is extremely important to make sure your plan works BEFORE it’s put into action. There would be nothing worse than to feel you have a good plan but when something serious actually happens, it all falls apart because it wasn’t properly tested or viable in actual practice.
• The various components of testing may involve training staff, practice drills where you can receive feedback on areas of improvement, and allowing yourself time to make adjustments where necessary. Project management software would be useful in organising all of this with the many different people involved – we have an article on some of the best free project management software here.

When Should You Review Your Plan?

A Business Continuity Plan should be a living, breathing entity just as your company is. As life’s natural changes occur, and shifts in your business infrastructure inevitably occur over different periods of time, you will need to ensure that your plan is regularly updated so it’s the best it can be.

Key factors that should trigger a review include:

• Changes to staff: New staff will need to be informed about the practices of your plans, and sometimes the plan may need to be adjusted to accommodate new staff, if they have specific needs for example.
• Changes to premises: Your plan should include emergency procedures for every physical premise you have, so if there is a change there make sure your plan reflects that to ensure it’s as optimal as possible.
• Changes to processes: If there are changes to your processes, your plan should reflect these changes so that everyone can stay updated and there is as little confusion as possible in the event of anything unexpected.

How Often Should You Review Your Plan?

• Timeframe: An annual review is good practice to review and update your business continuity plan, because usually in that amount of time a business, the environment of the business and the world would have naturally changed and evolved to some extent.
• Who to update: You should inform anyone within your company that the changes will affect, such as staff and employees, who will need to know in order to adjust their behaviours and processes and move forward safely. (You can use your list of key people for this).
• How / where to store your BCP: As mentioned above in the ‘critical business section’, it’s important that your BCP is stored in a few different locations, and accessible to the people who may need it.

Your business continuity plan should not just be something you create then never intend to action. You never know when an emergency event will come into play that could potentially break your business in some way or another, and you can use the free template provided by Clickup to rectify that.

Hopefully you’ll never need to use your plan, but in the worst case scenario, you can rest assured that you have yourself and your business covered.

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Business Continuity Planning

Organize a business continuity team and compile a  business continuity plan  to manage a business disruption. Learn more about how to put together and test a business continuity plan with the videos below.

Business Continuity Plan Supporting Resources

• Business Continuity Plan Situation Manual
• Business Continuity Plan Test Exercise Planner Instructions
• Business Continuity Plan Test Facilitator and Evaluator Handbook

Business Continuity Training Videos

The Business Continuity Planning Suite is no longer supported or available for download.

Business Continuity Training Introduction

An overview of the concepts detailed within this training. Also, included is a humorous, short video that introduces viewers to the concept of business continuity planning and highlights the benefits of having a plan. Two men in an elevator experience a spectrum of disasters from a loss of power, to rain, fire, and a human threat. One man is prepared for each disaster and the other is not.

View on YouTube

Business Continuity Training Part 1: What is Business Continuity Planning?

An explanation of what business continuity planning means and what it entails to create a business continuity plan. This segment also incorporates an interview with a company that has successfully implemented a business continuity plan and includes a discussion about what business continuity planning means to them.

Business Continuity Training Part 2: Why is Business Continuity Planning Important?

An examination of the value a business continuity plan can bring to an organization. This segment also incorporates an interview with a company that has successfully implemented a business continuity plan and includes a discussion about how business continuity planning has been valuable to them.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: What's the Business Continuity Planning Process?

An overview of the business continuity planning process. This segment also incorporates an interview with a company about its process of successfully implementing a business continuity plan.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 1

The first of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should “prepare” to create a business continuity plan.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 2

The second of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should “define” their business continuity plan objectives.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 3

The third of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should “identify” and prioritize potential risks and impacts.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 4

The fourth of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should “develop” business continuity strategies.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 5

The fifth of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should define their “teams” and tasks.

Business Continuity Training Part 3: Planning Process Step 6

The sixth of six steps addressed in this Business Continuity Training, which detail the process of building a business continuity plan. This step addresses how organizations should “test” their business continuity plans. View on YouTube

Last Updated: 12/21/2023

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9 Business Continuity Plan Goals + Objectives Every Business Should Use

• February 14, 2024

Identifying your business continuity plan objectives is an important first step in creating a comprehensive plan that helps your organization recover from all kinds of disasters, including fires, floods, and ransomware attacks. Unfortunately, many business leaders aren’t sure what those objectives should be or why they matter.

To help you get started, we’ve identified nine business continuity plan objectives that focus your team’s energies on building critical policies and procedures that establish lasting resilience in your business operations. Consider communicating these objectives at your project launch meeting, emphasizing them in your project communications, and listing them at the opening of your business continuity plan (BCP) document .

The Purpose of Business Continuity Plan Objectives

Putting these objectives into words serves two purposes. First, it provides a high-level overview of the areas that the document must address and gives the plan administrators a guide to what the plan should accomplish. Second, it gives stakeholders and other personnel a clearer understanding of the document’s purpose and scope.

By clearly defining these objectives before starting your business continuity planning process, you increase the likelihood that you’ll achieve the core goal of your plan: preparing the business for a disaster scenario so you can minimize downtime when such an event occurs.

Aligning Objectives and Goals With the Business Continuity Plan Template

We aligned these objectives with the format of the Business Continuity Plan template developed by Ready.gov, an organization that marshals the resources of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Its mission is to deliver materials to the public to improve the nation’s ability to respond to emergencies. This site includes a section devoted to business issues , which is where you can find the business continuity plan template.

These are the sections of the BCP template provided by Ready.gov:

• Program Administration
• Business Continuity Organization
• Business Impact Analysis
• Business Continuity Strategy & Requirements
• Manual Workarounds
• Incident Management
• Training Testing and Exercising
• Program Maintenance and Improvement

As you explore the objectives, note that we’ve recommended sections of the BCP template in italics. These suggestions should clarify which areas would best help you achieve each objective.

9 Critical Business Continuity Plan Objectives and Goals

Every business has unique needs and requirements when it comes to business continuity. However, these nine objectives universally apply to practically any organization.

Objective 1: Identify Disaster Recovery Personnel

BCP Template Section: Business Continuity Organization

When a crisis occurs, your organization should already know who is serving on the relevant disaster recovery team. This enables them to act quickly and avoid confusion. As part of your planning process, you’ll need to address these questions:

• Who is on your disaster recovery teams?
• What is each person’s role?
• How can they be reached in an emergency?
• Who are the alternates in the event the primary individual is unavailable?

Although you’ll have many employees in critical roles, one of the most important is the crisis management or disaster recovery coordinator. This person has the authority to make decisions, initiate recovery plan protocols, and direct the recovery of business operations. The coordinator is also responsible for communicating with the company’s insurance companies about policies related to disaster impacts, including their  cyber insurance policy , which helps mitigate the financial effect of a disaster.

Objective 2: Assess Risks and Impact

BCP Template Section: Business Impact Analysis

While creating a BCP, you’ll conduct a risk assessment to identify any internal and external threats to your operations. You’ll incorporate the results of this assessment into a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) that will specify different types of disasters that could disrupt your business.

Quantifying Risk

As the author of the article “ Why the BIA Provides the Foundation Stone for Business Continuity ” explains, a business is like a “delicate ecosystem where everything needs to work in balance and harmony.” A disaster can throw that ecosystem out of balance, and organizations need to understand the possible impacts. As such, you’ll quantify several key points about each potential scenario, including:

• The projected amount of damage it would cause
• The estimated recovery time
• The cost of operational losses

These elements of the BIA lay the foundation for the remainder of your BCP. All your recovery strategies, continuity plans, and update processes derive from the work that occurs during this phase. The BIA allows your company to uncover all the linkages among internal business operations, suppliers, and customers, so you can anticipate what might become de-linked and estimate the potential impact.

Producing a thorough BIA sometimes requires an outside perspective.  Business continuity consultants , for example, can pick up on linkages that employees in the system might overlook because they’re too close to particular functions to see all potential implications for your business and customers.

Establishing Essential Metrics

Another goal of developing a BIA is to determine your plan’s Recovery Time Objective  (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The RTO is the amount of time a business has to restore a process and its associated applications following a serious event or outage. The RPO, on the other hand, indicates how much data an organization can lose following an incident before significant damage occurs.

These measurements are critical because they are the basis for defining your recovery strategies. They guide your recovery process investment decisions, so you can avoid wasting resources and under-funding your strategy.

Objective 3: Outline Existing Preventive Measures

Even if you don’t realize it, most stakeholders in your business are probably wondering what you’re doing to prevent ransomware situations like the ones they see on the news every day. That’s another purpose of your BCP.

It outlines the technologies, tools, and protocols that you already have in place to prevent or mitigate the effects of a disaster. Technologies for premises-based data backup and cloud services backup are part of this preventive measures analysis.

Because it demonstrates what assets are already in place, the preventive measures analysis offers a way to gain agreement among team members about what investments the company needs to make. Often referred to as a gap analysis, this process builds consensus so the business continuity team can use the BCP findings as a tool to seek investment capital from executive decision-makers.

Objective 4: Provide the Step-by-Step Protocols

BCP Template Section: Business Continuity Strategies and Requirements

Chances are good that at least some of your personnel won’t remember what they’re supposed to do when a disaster strikes. Your plan will provide them with specific procedures that they need to follow. Similarly, while your disaster teams should have a general idea of the necessary steps, the BCP serves as a document they can consult to ensure they follow the procedures exactly as they’re listed.

Keep in mind that this information is part of your disaster recovery plan , which is an element of your BCP but also a standalone document. It includes granular instructions for items such as:

• The definition of plan-triggering events
• Emergency alert and escalation procedures
• Steps in activating emergency response teams
• Team assembly points

All these elements are necessary to build well-constructed response protocols.

Objective 5: Identify the Location of Critical Data and Assets

One of the most important IT business continuity plan objectives is identifying where critical data and other assets are stored. This allows recovery teams to begin recovery even if key IT personnel are unavailable.

Imagine, for example, a scenario in which you suddenly had no IT workforce. You’ll need, at the very least, a footprint for other personnel or stakeholders to follow. Otherwise, a sense of confusion and chaos could seriously delay your recovery process.

An IT asset management system offers companies a way to automate asset tracking and reduce errors resulting from various issues, including:

• Out-of-date information
• Inaccurate serial numbers
• Tag overlaps

Asset management systems also play a role in cybersecurity preventive measures. Without a complete asset management list, an organization might overlook a device that connects to the network without virus protection or the latest patch to meet a known security threat.

Objective 6: Identify Back-Up Locations and Resources

BCP Template Sections: Business Continuity Strategies and Requirements; Incident Management

A disaster could make your facility unusable, so recovery teams need to know where and how to relocate operations. Your BCP will outline the availability of any back-up office space or explain what the team should do to quickly secure a new space.

There are several different types of disaster recovery backup sites , and they’re generally classified in one of four ways:

• Cold site:  A facility that has adequate space and infrastructure (electric power, telecommunications connections, and environmental controls) to support IT systems and may have raised floors and other attributes suitable for IT operations
• Warm site:  A partially equipped office space that houses some or all of the system hardware, software, telecommunications, and power sources
• Hot site:  An office space that’s appropriately sized to support system requirements and configured with the necessary system hardware, supporting infrastructure, and support personnel to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week
• Mobile site:  A self-contained, transportable shell custom-fitted with specific telecommunications and IT equipment necessary to meet system requirements

In addition to addressing the temporary space for your operations, your BCP should also describe whether you have access to back-up physical resources, such as workstations and devices.

Objective 7: Prioritize Emergency Communications

BCP Template Sections: Business Continuity Strategies and Requirements; Incident Management 

Who communicates with the client during an emergency? Who notifies the workforce? Who speaks to the media? By having a business continuity management policy in place, recovery personnel will know the answers to these questions and understand their roles in both internal and external emergency communications.

One of the goals of your crisis communications plan is to help maintain calm within your workforce so all parties can fulfill their responsibilities and continue to serve customers. Disaster events can eliminate ordinary methods of communication, so your plan should specify alternative channels.

Identifying and understanding your audiences  or stakeholders is the necessary first step in formulating your crisis communications plan. They might include:

• Survivors and their families
• Employees and their families
• Community members, especially neighbors living near the facility
• Company management, directors, and investors
• Government elected officials, regulators, and other authorities

To provide a speedy response and a consistent message, assign a spokesperson for each of these audiences.

Objective 8: Find Weaknesses and Propose Solutions

BCP Template Sections: Testing, Testing & Exercising; Program Maintenance and Improvement 

Continuity planning is more than just a static document. It’s an ongoing process, and you shouldn’t expect it to be perfect. However, it’s vital to address any holes and vulnerabilities by conducting ongoing risk assessments, identifying scenarios that would leave operations unprotected, and developing action steps to address issues that require immediate attention.

Business continuity plan testing is an important element of ensuring your plan is current and responsive to changing conditions. There are four categories of testing:

• Plan review:  Senior management and department heads analyze the BCP and discuss potential improvements.
• Tabletop exercise or structured walk-through:  In this scenario-based, role-playing exercise, the objective is to ensure all critical personnel in your organization are aware of and familiar with the relevant portions of the BCP, as well as their role in a disaster.
• Walk-through drill or simulation test:  This test can incorporate actual disaster recovery actions  such as backup recovery, live testing of redundant systems, simulated responses at alternate locations, and actual notification and resource mobilization.
• Functional or full recovery test:  This is a complete test of your backup systems with parallel testing (running your live and backup systems in conjunction) or a full failover test (completely transitioning operations to your backup systems).

Your testing schedule depends on a variety of factors, including your company’s size, the pace of equipment upgrades and installations, and the amount of turnover in your IT staff. Generally speaking, business continuity professionals recommend annual testing as the absolute minimum.

Objective 9: Fulfill External Requirements

The final objective doesn’t link to any particular section of the BCP template. Instead, it addresses the reality that your company may have to provide a BCP to satisfy external requirements  from regulators, vendors, and insurance companies.

As noted by the Disaster Recovery Institute (DRI), there are over 120 regulations that mandate business continuity management across a variety of industries. They fall under regulatory authorities and legislation such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

In addition, requests for proposals (RFPs) increasingly include a requirement to demonstrate an active business continuity management program. Likewise, many insurers want to see evidence of a BCP as a part of the underwriting process.

Craft a Continuity Plan for Your Business

Business continuity leadership faces a significant challenge. They have to gain organizational commitment to achieving these critical business continuity plan objectives while also motivating employees to spend time on issues that don’t directly contribute to their daily goals.

Recruiting the right team, adopting a collaborative approach with participants , engaging senior management early in the process, and investing in training and certification will contribute to the long-term success of your continuity planning.

As a provider of business continuity services, Invenio IT has helped clients navigate disaster incidents. Schedule a meeting with one of our data protection specialists to learn more about the latest disaster recovery solutions and how our team can help you minimize downtime from disruptive incidents.

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What Is Business Continuity? Everything You Need to Know

Michael Hickins | Content Strategist | May 16, 2024

In This Article

What Is Business Continuity?

Business continuity explained, why is business continuity important to businesses, what does business continuity include, what is included in a business continuity plan (bcp), building a business continuity plan, testing a business continuity plan, business continuity standards, business continuity and disaster recovery, technology and business continuity, simplify your business continuity strategy with oracle cloud infrastructure, business continuity faqs.

Business continuity brings together people and technology to help organizations prepare for and overcome interruptions to normal business operations. Business continuity planning encompasses disaster recovery—the restoration of IT services following an unexpected outage—but its purpose is broader. The goal of a business continuity strategy is to keep the business up and running regardless of whether operations are impacted by an unplanned catastrophe, such as an earthquake, or a planned event, such as applying a major infrastructure patch.

Business leaders use business continuity as a paradigm for maintaining operations, even if in a temporarily limited capacity, in the event of unexpected or planned disruptions to normal business processes. These disruptions can include natural disasters, cyberattacks, armed conflict or other force majeure, global pandemics, power outages due to storms or flooding, infrastructure failures, planned maintenance activities, and even the unexpected departure of a key employee. Cloud computing technologies such as containerization and virtualization can help make business continuity measures more affordable for companies of all sizes.

Key Takeaways

• Business continuity involves developing processes ahead of time to maintain availability during unexpected or planned disruptions to normal operations.
• Business continuity planning is a methodology for ensuring that a business has the processes in place to maintain critical functions.
• Business continuity planning involves assembling a team, assessing risks, identifying priority operations, and ensuring that a disaster recovery plan is in place that can bring critical IT infrastructure and data back online in a timely manner.
• Business continuity isn’t a one-and-done proposition. The plan has to be practiced and tested regularly so people are familiar with their responsibilities and gaps in the plan can be identified and closed.
• A new generation of cloud computing, containerization in particular, has made business continuity and disaster recovery more efficient and cost-effective than even 10 years ago.

Businesses typically adopt strategies to thwart existential threats such as established competitors, market entrants, sudden changes in customer behavior or tastes, and technological change.

However, another threat that’s more difficult to plan for is an unexpected, usually temporary event that makes it difficult or impossible for the business to continue operating as usual. Natural events such as hurricanes and prolonged heat waves can result in a loss of the electric power used to run facilities or critical IT services. Criminal entities or nation-states can interrupt IT operations or hold data for ransom. Other types of events, such as the unexpected death or departure of key personnel, supply chain disruptions due to war or labor strikes, and consumer boycotts, are equally difficult to plan for.

Successful companies therefore develop business continuity plans to provide a template for how managers and other employees should react should such extraordinary events occur.

On the flip side, companies that don’t have business continuity plans face significant peril. Even accounting for variables such as the industry, company size, and business type, downtime of an organization’s online presence alone can cost it between US$2,300 and US$9,000 per minute—and that doesn’t account for the cost of damage to its reputation and business relationships.

Most businesses can withstand slowing or halting their business activities for a short period of time, although banks, utilities, healthcare providers, and companies in some other industries aren’t afforded this luxury and must follow statutory requirements and ensure they can resume normal operations almost immediately following a disruption.

In most cases, irrespective of regulatory requirements, businesses can ill afford a prolonged disruption to their activities because even the most patient customers will eventually find alternative vendors. In fact, an extended downtime event at a competitor can present an opportunity for others in the sector to gain market share.

When planning for business continuity, organizations should also consider partners, vendors, and sensitive supply chains, where outages could have irreparable cascading downstream effects.

In its simplest terms, business continuity is the idea that an organization will continue operations in spite of disasters, events, nefarious acts, or other calamities that temporarily interrupt the ordinary course of business. It includes the following:

• Assessing functions such as production, customer service, sales, and marketing and ranking them by order of priority. In an emergency, your organization may not be able to get all its functions up and running immediately, so knowing which ones are most critical to its success is crucial to surviving the first minutes, hours, and days.
• Assessing key suppliers and service providers for their adaptability and flexibility. Ensure that they have their own business continuity plans, and in the case of IT providers, that they have redundancy, data replication, and other disaster recovery processes in place to ensure your business won’t suffer from disruptions to their operations.
• Ensuring that the business complies with relevant local, national, and international standards; this is most important in the finance, healthcare, and utility sectors.

At its most basic, a business continuity plan (BCP) is the simple acknowledgement by leadership that unforeseen disruptive events, often outside the organization’s control, will inevitably occur and that they should take steps to ensure the company will be able to continue doing business, even if in a limited capacity for a short period of time.

A BCP must include the disaster recovery (DR) plan, which, as its name suggests, is a framework for recovering systems and, most importantly, data after an unexpected outage. Events that can cause such an outage include hurricanes or tornadoes that knock out power or make travel to corporate offices impossible, armed conflicts that disrupt supply chains, cyberattacks that render systems inoperable, and global pandemics that force people to work from home. But the most common cause of disaster is human error, such as an employee unwittingly falling for a phishing scam or a database administrator who doesn’t get around to applying a software patch until after the system is compromised.

And while it’s true that future events are impossible to predict, failing to prepare for them would be foolhardy—and against laws and regulations governing many industries. As Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former US president and supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, noted: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

In other words, unexpected events can make the details of many plans irrelevant or anachronistic, but the very process of planning helps ready an organization for whatever may come next. Eisenhower also said of planning: “If you haven’t been planning you can’t start to work, intelligently at least.”

Still, DR is integral to but not the only key component of an effective BCP. A comprehensive BCP should include the following elements:

• Business impact analysis. Determine which functions and processes are critical to the organization’s survival, and understand the impact if they were to be disrupted. This analysis should be continuous, but it’s especially important when the business expands into new product markets or geographic areas and when it adds core technologies such as a new data center or new cloud infrastructure. For example, a business with key operations in areas hit frequently by tropical storms should consider building or leasing facilities in areas outside a typical storm’s path.
• Communications plan. Establish clear communication channels for internal and external stakeholders to provide timely and accurate information during a crisis.
• Employee well-being and safety. Plan for remote work capabilities, and prioritize the health and safety of employees and their families over other considerations.
• Risk assessment and management. Assess how key customers, suppliers, or other partners on which the business depends might react to sudden business disruptions, how supply chains might be affected, which legal issues might arise, and what exposure the organization has to natural disasters and other disruptions.
• Supply chain resilience. Develop strategies to manage supply chain risk, including diversifying suppliers and sourcing options wherever possible. Consider a scenario where the business has to relocate to one or more secondary locations.
• Training and awareness. Regularly train employees on their roles in the event of a disaster or other major business disruption so they’re comfortable with the procedures and protocols they should follow.

Business continuity planning is essential to the survival of an organization in the event of a natural disaster or other disruption to the normal course of business. Indeed, about 25% of businesses don’t reopen after disasters, according to the US Federal Emergency Management Agency . Businesses should take the following steps to build an effective BCP:

• Identify a business continuity manager (BCM) and make it clear that the BCM has the full support of senior leaders. At large companies, the BCM often reports to the chief financial officer.
• The BCM should assemble a team representing key business functions, such as manufacturing, sales, customer service, IT, operations, human resources, and marketing.
• This team then works to identify areas of the business that are critical to ongoing operations, such as IT, telecommunications infrastructure, building management, vendor management, and payroll, as well as customers that generate significant amounts of revenue. Typically, businesses peg their continuity plans to two metrics: a recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). The RTO is the maximum length of time it should take to bring critical IT systems back online. The RPO is how much data the business can afford to lose before it’s harmed beyond the determined acceptable limits.
• Create a list of key stakeholders, including their full contact information and areas of responsibility. The BCM should ensure that physical copies of the list are easily accessible in a number of specified locations. In other words, don’t assume digital versions of the list, or anything else, will be available during a disruption.
• Determine which business areas have priority in the event of a disruption and whether current deployments allow for recovery within the stated RTO time frame. Does a business unit or line-of-business team require a simple backup, data replication to a secondary site, or real-time data protection and recovery? For example, if it’s determined that the business can’t tolerate the loss of an ecommerce site for more than an hour but the current deployment of that site would require a recovery time of four hours, IT may need to re-architect the site or find a new provider. Additionally, acknowledge which risks the business is willing to accept because hedging them would be too expensive, and offset them in some other way, such as by purchasing an insurance policy.
• Create communications plans for the business as a whole and for each functional area. Make sure key stakeholders are aware of these plans and can access them in the event of a disruption.
• Identify locations, including home offices, that could be used as temporary worksites if the main offices are inaccessible for long periods of time. Plan to make critical data and applications available as quickly as possible in those locations.
• Vet key suppliers and service providers to ensure they have their own BCPs in place that protect your business should they encounter a significant disruption.
• Practice the plan by walking all stakeholders through the steps that must be taken in the event of a disruption. Set up a schedule to test these plans at least once a year to identify and control for changes among suppliers, personnel, or facilities.

Finally, experts advise making recovery operations as automated as possible, allowing stakeholders and workers to focus on the overall business continuity plan. One example is using failover systems that automatically switch to backup servers or networks if the primary ones fail. Automation increases the chances of a positive, predictable outcome.

Business continuity plans are only as good as the habits of the people who use them. While predicting an actual disaster is near impossible, it’s entirely possible to simulate a disruptive event so staff can practice the actions they’ll likely have to perform. Before any testing can occur, stakeholders need to have seen and assimilated the BCP.

Tests should evaluate key elements of the plan, including reaction times to power outages and IT failures, the viability of both internal and external communications systems, and alert and activation procedures for key personnel.

Testing not only familiarizes people with their responsibilities in the event of a disruption, but it also helps identify plan gaps or flaws so they can be addressed before an actual emergency.

Best practices for this type of testing include the following:

• Tabletop testing. This involves bringing key stakeholders into a physical or virtual conference room, describing a disruptive event, and then asking each of them to list the actions they would take in accordance with the BCP they will have already read.
• Walk-through testing. Also known as a mock recovery test, this is a more comprehensive version of the tabletop exercise. In this test, employees physically walk through the steps they would take in the event of a disruption. For example, facilities management staff would demonstrate how they would ensure that backup generators were functioning, and someone in IT would use the contact information document to get in touch with your data center or cloud service provider.
• Third-party testing services. Outside vendors test how prepared your organization’s staff and key stakeholders are to react to simulated disruptions, including ransomware demands and other nefarious acts. Firms that specialize in cybersecurity can test employees to help ensure they don’t fall for phishing or other psychological tricks that can result in breaches to IT systems.

BCMs should conduct tests at least annually and establish a format for stakeholders to share and review the results.

Business continuity plans in certain industries—notably financial services, utilities, and healthcare—are subject to local, national, and/or international standards. In fact, more than 120 business continuity management regulations apply to a variety of industries, according to DRI International , a nonprofit disaster recovery consultancy. These include Security and Exchange Commission, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations in the United States as well as the BASEL III international regulatory framework for banks and the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO 22301.

Other business continuity standards include the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s SP 800-34 and 24762 and the US National Fire Protection Association’s NFPA 1600 standard for continuity, emergency, and crisis management. More general business continuity regulations include the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which, because it governs the storage and dissemination of data, is also relevant to business continuity.

Business continuity and disaster recovery are closely related. Both are organizational plans for surviving and quickly recovering from a potentially catastrophic business disruption, and both are also closely linked to IT, given businesses’ reliance on IT infrastructure and applications.

To cite just one example of how dependent all businesses have become on IT, most professional sports venues in the United States no longer accept cash payments, meaning that computerized point-of-sale systems need to be operational for them to sell food, beverages, gear, and other goods.

Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery

ISO 22301 defines business continuity as “documented procedures that guide organizations to respond, recover, resume, and restore to a pre-defined level of operations following disruption.” Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity that involves restoring IT services, incrementally if necessary. A key way that business continuity differs from DR is that business continuity accounts for all business interruptions, including those that are planned.

Business continuity is contingent on a wide variety of factors, including the industry in which an organization operates and the nature of the disruption itself. But in the Information Age, almost all business continuity depends on some level of IT functionality. It’s therefore crucial for companies to make certain that they have appropriate levels of redundant infrastructure and data replication in place, not just to support the ordinary course of business but also to ensure the business can operate efficiently enough during a disruptive event.

The shorter the RTOs and RPOs, the better for continuity. However, the cost of achieving any RTO or RPO goes up as each objective becomes shorter. Architectural choices can help. Business leaders should consider using cloud computing and, optimally, containers to further isolate critical data from systems that have been disrupted. They should also look for cloud service providers with geographically disparate failover facilities.

One of the advantages of cloud computing from a business continuity perspective is what’s called “pilot light deployments,” where secondary sites or copies of corporate workloads can be as small as a single virtual machine (VM) or container. In the case of a failover, that single VM or container can, if needed, kick off an automated process that lets your organization spin up the rest of the infrastructure. And by using a pilot light deployment, organizations need only pay for that single resource rather than replicating an entire system.

Another strategy is the so-called “blue-green” architecture, where instead of having four to six redundant environments for development and testing and a separate one for production deployment, an organization deploys only two redundant, distributed environments. Let’s say the “blue” environment is production and the “green” is development and testing. When development is completed, the “green” environment becomes the primary production environment, and the “blue” environment is used for development, testing, and disaster recovery. This cycle then repeats itself.

Oracle makes it simpler and more affordable to develop a holistic business continuity plan. Because Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was developed later than other hyperscale clouds, it was built for better efficiency and reliability, lower latency, and superior flexibility compared with competing clouds. In addition to containers, OCI has flexible virtual machines, which means businesses can buy only as much compute power as they need. Other providers offer less flexibility, requiring customers to overprovision their instances, costing them more money. OCI has multiple geographically separated cloud regions in many countries, enabling customers to remain compliant with data sovereignty regulations while still having disparate locations for the purposes of business continuity.

Based on decades of development experience and real-world customer feedback, Oracle has developed best practices called Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) . Oracle MAA provides the blueprint for implementing high availability, scalability, disaster recovery, and data protection solutions in Oracle Database environments.

The Oracle MAA best practices, maintained by a team of Oracle developers, continually validate the integrated use of Oracle Database High Availability features such as Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Data Guard using chaos engineering techniques and other testing methodologies.

Oracle MAA is further extended with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Full Stack Disaster Recovery service. OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery orchestrates the transition of compute, databases, and applications between OCI regions from around the globe with a single click. Customers can automate the steps needed to recover one or more business systems without redesigning or re-architecting existing infrastructure, databases, or applications and without needing specialized management or conversion servers.

Moreover, Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Database Service have redundancy built in, which means customers don’t pay extra for data replication within the same availability zone.

The expectations for business continuity have changed as the technology landscape has evolved. For example, most businesses used to think about RTOs in terms of so-called tier 1 applications, but less expensive cloud computing options, such as pilot lights, mean that organizations can afford to create business continuity plans for all their applications.

Cloud is key to a successful—and affordable—business continuity strategy. Learn why.

What are the 4 pillars of business continuity?

At its most basic, business continuity consists of assembling a team focused on business continuity, assessing which areas of the business are most at risk during a disruptive event, creating a plan for maintaining operations at minimally viable levels, and then rehearsing and testing that plan on a regular basis.

What’s the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery?

Business continuity is an organizational approach to ensuring that an organization can continue operating in some capacity through any disruption, planned or not, while disaster recovery focuses on bringing IT systems back up.

Why is having a BCP important?

Organizations that don’t have updated business continuity plans are at greater risk than those that do. At worst, they may permanently go out of business due to a significant unexpected disruption to normal operations that drives customers to competitors, loses data, and proves expensive to fix.

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10 Free Business Plan Templates in Word, Excel, & ClickUp

Praburam Srinivasan

Growth Marketing Manager

February 13, 2024

Turning your vision into a clear and coherent business plan can be confusing and tough. 

Hours of brainstorming and facing an intimidating blank page can raise more questions than answers. Are you covering everything? What should go where? How do you keep each section thorough but brief?

If these questions have kept you up at night and slowed your progress, know you’re not alone. That’s why we’ve put together the top 10 business plan templates in Word, Excel, and ClickUp—to provide answers, clarity, and a structured framework to work with. This way, you’re sure to capture all the relevant information without wasting time. 

And the best part? Business planning becomes a little less “ugh!” and a lot more “aha!” 🤩

What is a Business Plan Template?

What makes a good business plan template, 1. clickup business plan template, 2. clickup sales plan template, 3. clickup business development action plan template, 4. clickup business roadmap template, 5. clickup business continuity plan template, 6. clickup lean business plan template, 7. clickup small business action plan template, 8. clickup strategic business roadmap template , 9. microsoft word business plan template by microsoft, 10. excel business plan template by vertex42.

A business plan template is a structured framework for entrepreneurs and business executives who want to create business plans. It comes with pre-arranged sections and headings that cover key elements like the executive summary , business overview, target customers, unique value proposition, marketing plans, and financial statements.  

A good business plan template helps with thorough planning, clear documentation, and practical implementation. Here’s what to look for:

• Comprehensive structure: A good template comes with all the relevant sections to outline a business strategy, such as executive summary, market research and analysis, and financial projections 
• Clarity and guidance: A good template is easy to follow. It has brief instructions or prompts for each section, guiding you to think deeply about your business and ensuring you don’t skip important details
• Clean design: Aesthetics matter. Choose a template that’s not just functional but also professionally designed. This ensures your plan is presentable to stakeholders, partners, and potential investors
• Flexibility : Your template should easily accommodate changes without hassle, like adding or removing sections, changing content and style, and rearranging parts 🛠️ 

While a template provides the structure, it’s the information you feed it that brings it to life. These pointers will help you pick a template that aligns with your business needs and clearly showcases your vision.

10 Business Plan Templates to Use in 2024

Preparing for business success in 2024 (and beyond) requires a comprehensive and organized business plan. We’ve handpicked the best templates to help you guide your team, attract investors, and secure funding. Let’s check them out.

If you’re looking to replace a traditional business plan document, then ClickUp’s Business Plan Template is for you!

This one-page business plan template, designed in ClickUp Docs , is neatly broken down into the following sections:

• Company description : Overview, mission, vision, and team
• Market analysis : Problem, solution, target market, competition, and competitive advantage
• Sales and marketing strategy : Products/services and marketing channels
• Operational plan : Location and facilities, equipment and tools, manpower, and financial forecasts
• Milestones and metrics: Targets and KPIs

Customize the template with your company logo and contact details, and easily navigate to different sections using the collapsible table of contents. The mini prompts under each section guide you on what to include—with suggestions on how to present the data (e.g., bullet lists, pictures, charts, and tables). 

You can share the document with anyone via URL and collaborate in real time. And when the business plan is ready, you have the option to print it or export it to PDF, HTML, or Markdown.

But that’s not all. This template is equipped with basic and enterprise project management features to streamline the business plan creation process . The Topics List view has a list of all the different sections and subsections of the template and allows you to assign it to a team member, set a due date, and attach relevant documents and references.

Switch from List to Board view to track and update task statuses according to the following: To Do, In Progress, Needs Revision, and Complete. 

This template is a comprehensive toolkit for documenting the different sections of your business plan and streamlining the creation process to ensure it’s completed on time. 🗓️

If you’re looking for a tool to kickstart or update your sales plan, ClickUp’s Sales Plan Template has got you covered. This sales plan template features a project summary list with tasks to help you craft a comprehensive and effective sales strategy. Some of these tasks include:

• Determine sales objectives and goals
• Draft positioning statement
• Perform competitive analysis
• Draft ideal customer persona
• Create a lead generation strategy

Assign each task to a specific individual or team, set priority levels , and add due dates. Specify what section of the sales plan each task belongs to (e.g., executive summary, revenue goals, team structure, etc.), deliverable type (such as document, task, or meeting), and approval state (like pending, needs revisions, and approved).

And in ClickUp style, you can switch to multiple views: List for a list of all tasks, Board for visual task management, Timeline for an overview of task durations, and Gantt to get a view of task dependencies. 

This simple business plan template is perfect for any type of business looking to create a winning sales strategy while clarifying team roles and keeping tasks organized. ✨

Thinking about scaling your business’s reach and operations but unsure where or how to start? It can be overwhelming, no doubt—you need a clear vision, measurable goals, and an actionable plan that every member of your team can rally behind. 

Thankfully, ClickUp’s Business Development Action Plan Template is designed to use automations to simplify this process so every step toward your business growth is clear, trackable, and actionable.

Start by assessing your current situation and deciding on your main growth goal. Are you aiming to increase revenue, tap into new markets, or introduce new products or services? With ClickUp Whiteboards or Docs, brainstorm and collaborate with your team on this decision.

Set and track your short- and long-term growth goals with ClickUp’s Goals , break them down into smaller targets, and assign these targets to team members, complete with due dates. Add these targets to a new ClickUp Dashboard to track real-time progress and celebrate small wins. 🎉

Whether you’re a startup or small business owner looking to hit your next major milestone or an established business exploring new avenues, this template keeps your team aligned, engaged, and informed every step of the way.

ClickUp’s Business Roadmap Template is your go-to for mapping out major strategies and initiatives in areas like revenue growth, brand awareness, community engagement, and customer satisfaction. 

Use the List view to populate tasks under each initiative. With Custom Fields, you can capture which business category (e.g., Product, Operations, Sales & Marketing, etc.) tasks fall under and which quarter they’re slated for. You can also link to relevant documents and resources and evaluate tasks by effort and impact to ensure the most critical tasks get the attention they deserve. 👀

Depending on your focus, this template provides different views to show just what you need. For example, the All Initiatives per Quarter view lets you focus on what’s ahead by seeing tasks that need completion within a specific quarter. This ensures timely execution and helps in aligning resources effectively for the short term.

This template is ideal for business executives and management teams who need to coordinate multiple short- and long-term initiatives and business strategies.

In business, unexpected threats to operations can arise at any moment. Whether it’s economic turbulence, a global health crisis, or supply chain interruptions, every company needs to be ready. ClickUp’s Business Continuity Plan Template lets you prepare proactively for these unforeseen challenges.

The template organizes tasks into three main categories:

• Priorities: Tasks that need immediate attention
• Continuity coverage: Tasks that must continue despite challenges
• Guiding principles: Resources and protocols to ensure smooth operations

The Board view makes it easy to visualize all the tasks under each of these categories. And the Priorities List sorts tasks by those that are overdue, the upcoming ones, and then the ones due later.

In times of uncertainty, being prepared is your best strategy. This template helps your business not just survive but thrive in challenging situations, keeping your customers, employees, and investors satisfied. 🤝

Looking to execute your business plan the “lean” way? Use ClickUp’s Lean Business Plan Template . It’s designed to help you optimize resource usage and cut unnecessary steps—giving you better results with less effort.

In the Plan Summary List view, list all the tasks that need to get done. Add specific details like who’s doing each task, when it’s due, and which part of the Business Model Canvas (BMC) it falls under. The By Priority view sorts this list based on priorities like Urgent, High, Normal, and Low. This makes it easy to spot the most important tasks and tackle them first.

Additionally, the Board view gives you an overview of task progression from start to finish. And the BMC view rearranges these tasks based on the various BMC components. 

Each task can further be broken down into subtasks and multiple checklists to ensure all related action items are executed. ✔️

This template is an invaluable resource for startups and large enterprises looking to maximize process efficiencies and results in a streamlined and cost-effective way.

The Small Business Action Plan Template by ClickUp is tailor-made for small businesses looking to transform their business ideas and goals into actionable steps and, eventually, into reality. 

It provides a simple and organized framework for creating, assigning, prioritizing, and tracking tasks. And in effect, it ensures that goals are not just set but achieved. Through the native dashboard and goal-setting features, you can monitor task progress and how they move you closer to achieving your goals.

Thanks to ClickUp’s robust communication features like chat, comments, and @mentions, it’s easy to get every team member on the same page and quickly address questions or concerns.

Use this action plan template to hit your business goals by streamlining your internal processes and aligning team efforts.

For larger businesses and scaling enterprises, getting different departments to work together toward a big goal can be challenging. The ClickUp Strategic Business Roadmap Template makes it easier by giving you a clear plan to follow.

This template is packaged in a folder and split into different lists for each department in your business, like Sales, Product, Marketing, and Enablement. This way, every team can focus on their tasks while collectively contributing to the bigger goal.

There are multiple viewing options available for team members. These include:

• Progress Board: Visualize tasks that are on track, those at risk, and those behind
• Gantt view: Get an overview of project timelines and dependencies
• Team view: See what each team member is working on so you can balance workloads for maximum productivity

While this template may feel overwhelming at first, the getting started guide offers a step-by-step breakdown to help you navigate it with ease. And like all ClickUp templates, you can easily customize it to suit your business needs and preferences.

Microsoft’s 20-page traditional business plan template simplifies the process of drafting comprehensive business plans. It’s made up of different sections, including:

• Executive summary : Highlights, objectives, mission statement, and keys to success
• Description of business: Company ownership and legal structure, hours of operation, products and services, suppliers, financial plans, etc.
• Marketing: Market analysis, market segmentation, competition, and pricing
• Appendix: Start-up expenses, cash flow statements, income statements, sales forecast, milestones, break-even analysis, etc.

The table of contents makes it easy to move to different sections of the document. And the text placeholders under each section provide clarity on the specific details required—making the process easier for users who may not be familiar with certain business terminology.

No business template roundup is complete without an Excel template. This business plan template lets you work on your business financials in Excel. It comes with customizable tables, formulas, and charts to help you look at the following areas:

• Highlight charts
• Market analysis
• Start-up assets and expenses
• Sales forecasts
• Profit and loss
• Balance sheet
• Cash flow projections
• Break-even analysis

This Excel template is especially useful when you want to create a clear and visual financial section for your business plan document—an essential element for attracting investors and lenders. However, there might be a steep learning curve to using this template if you’re not familiar with business financial planning and using Excel.

Try a Free Business Plan Template in ClickUp

Launching and running a successful business requires a well-thought-out and carefully crafted business plan. However, the business planning process doesn’t have to be complicated, boring, or take up too much time. Use any of the above 10 free business plan formats to simplify and speed up the process.

ClickUp templates go beyond offering a solid foundation to build your business plans. They come with extensive project management features to turn your vision into reality. And that’s not all— ClickUp’s template library offers over 1,000 additional templates to help manage various aspects of your business, from decision-making to product development to resource management .

Sign up for ClickUp’s Free Forever Plan today to fast-track your business’s growth! 🏆

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