Business Continuity Planning & Disaster Recovery
Build resilient services by aligning business continuity planning, continuity execution, and disaster recovery strategies.
Why Business Continuity Matters
Business Continuity Planning (BCP) ensures critical products and services remain available during disruptive events, while Disaster Recovery (DR) focuses on restoring IT systems, data, and infrastructure. Together they safeguard reputation, revenue, regulatory compliance, and customer trust.
Drivers
- Regulatory requirements (ISO 22301, FFIEC, DORA, NIS2)
- Contractual obligations with customers and partners
- Cyber incidents, supply-chain disruptions, natural disasters
- Board-level risk appetite and corporate governance
Key Outcomes
- Documented response playbooks and ownership
- Prioritised recovery objectives aligned with business impact
- Regular exercising and continuous improvement
- Integration with cybersecurity incident response and crisis management
BCP Lifecycle
- Programme Initiation: Define scope, governance, sponsorship, and policy.
- Business Impact Analysis (BIA): Identify critical services, dependencies, Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), maximum tolerable downtime (MTD).
- Risk Assessment: Evaluate threats (cyber, physical, supplier, workforce) and vulnerabilities.
- Strategy Development: Select continuity strategies (redundancy, alternate sites, cloud failover, manual workarounds).
- Plan Development: Produce response plans (incident response, crisis communications, DR runbooks, continuity plans) with ownership and checklists.
- Training & Awareness: Prepare staff, executive leadership, and third parties.
- Testing & Exercising: Tabletop, simulations, technical failover tests to validate strategies.
- Maintenance & Continuous Improvement: Update plans after changes, incidents, audits, and exercises.
Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
What To Capture
- Critical activities/services and their owners
- Supporting resources (people, facilities, applications, data, suppliers)
- Impact categories (financial, legal/regulatory, customer, reputation)
- RTO/RPO targets, MTD, Work Recovery Time (WRT)
Outputs
- Prioritised recovery tiers (Tier 0 mission critical, Tier 1 essential, etc.)
- Dependency maps for applications and third parties
- Baseline for continuity and recovery strategy decisions
- Input to crisis communications messaging priorities
Continuity & Recovery Strategy Options
People & Facilities
- Alternate sites (hot, warm, cold)
- Remote working and virtual desktops
- Cross-training and succession planning
- Mutual aid agreements with partner organisations
Technology
- Active-active or active-passive data centre failover
- Cloud DR (pilot light, warm standby, multi-region deployments)
- Regular data backups, immutable storage, offline copies
- Infrastructure-as-Code to recreate environments rapidly
Process & Suppliers
- Manual workarounds for critical processes
- Supplier resilience assessments and SLAs
- Alternative vendors or diversified supply chains
- Contract clauses covering continuity obligations
IT Disaster Recovery Execution
Runbook Components
- Activation criteria & decision authority
- Contact lists (internal teams, vendors, regulators)
- Step-by-step restoration procedures (systems, databases, networks)
- Data verification and integrity checks (checksums, application validation)
- Failback procedures when primary site is restored
Technical Considerations
- Backup regimes (full, incremental, differential, CDP)
- Recovery prioritisation (Tier 0 applications, identity services, communications)
- Network changes (DNS updates, routing modifications)
- Security controls during recovery (MFA, access reviews, logging continuity)
- Testing automation (Infrastructure as Code, synthetic transactions)
Crisis Management & Communications
- Establish a crisis management team (executives, legal, communications, operations, IT, HR).
- Use incident command principles (gold/silver/bronze levels) for coordination.
- Prepare message templates for staff, customers, regulators, media.
- Monitor social media and customer support channels for sentiment.
- Document decisions, approvals, and time stamps for after-action review.
Exercising the Plan
Exercise Types
- Tabletop: Discussion-based scenarios.
- Walkthrough/Workshop: Step-by-step review and role play.
- Simulation: Partial technical failover or data restore.
- Full Interruption: Planned outage to test full recovery (rare, high risk).
Evaluation Criteria
- Did we meet RTO/RPO targets?
- Were roles understood and properly executed?
- What gaps in documentation or tooling were revealed?
- How effective was communication and escalation?
Continuous Improvement
- Record lessons learned, update plans, and track remediation actions.
- Incorporate regulatory findings, audit recommendations, and real incidents.
- Align exercise schedule with risk profile and change calendar.
Measuring Resilience
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Exercise completion rates, audit closure times, % of critical apps with tested runbooks.
- Key Risk Indicators (KRIs): Recovery time exceedances, single points of failure, supplier SLA breaches.
- Governance: Report metrics to risk committees/boards; align with enterprise risk management (ERM) frameworks.
- Integration: Link continuity metrics with cybersecurity metrics (e.g., mean time to recover from ransomware).