From cyber attacks and earthquakes to supply chain breakdowns and pandemics, the frequency and severity of disruptions is increasing. Business continuity management (BCM) offers a structured, organization-wide approach to weathering these events and maintaining operational integrity.
This guide explains how to build, implement, and continuously improve a BCM strategy that meets your unique risk landscape and ensures the continuity of critical functions, no matter what comes your way.
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What is business continuity management?
Business continuity management is a proactive approach to ensuring that an organization can continue delivering its essential services during and after a disruptive incident. It is not limited to IT systems or disaster recovery, it spans people, processes, facilities, technologies, and third-party relationships.
Effective BCM is designed to do more than just “recover”. It provides the framework for absorbing shocks, maintaining trust, and returning to normal operations with minimal disruption. The benefits of BCM include:
- Resilience: Maintain core operations even under stress
- Reputation: Preserve stakeholder trust through reliable service delivery
- Compliance: Meet regulatory expectations and contractual obligations
- Financial protection: Avoid costly downtime and business losses
- Governance: Demonstrate mature risk oversight to boards and investors
Business continuity has become a boardroom issue, and a core measure of organizational maturity.
Key frameworks and standards for BCM
To develop an effective BCM program, organizations often align with widely recognized frameworks that provide guidance and structure:
- ISO 22301 is the international standard for business continuity management Systems (BCMS), offering a blueprint for planning, implementation, and continual improvement[1]
- The Business Continuity Institute’s Good Practice Guidelines are a practitioner-focused companion to ISO 22301, breaking down activities into six key BCM stages[2]
- National and sectoral guidance (e.g. from Japan’s Cabinet Office[3] or U.S. FEMA[4]) can help tailor approaches to jurisdictional risk landscapes and compliance requirements
These frameworks don’t just standardize processes, they foster a mindset of resilience across the enterprise.
How to build a business continuity plan (BCP)
At the heart of any BCM program is the business continuity plan (BCP). This is the actionable, scenario-ready guide that helps teams respond to and recover from disruption.
1. Identify critical business functions
Start with a business impact analysis (BIA) to determine which functions are critical for survival and recovery. Understand their dependencies, on people, systems, facilities, and vendors, and define acceptable downtime thresholds.
Prioritization is key. You can’t recover everything at once, so ensure your plan reflects operational realities and risk tolerances.
2. Assess risks and threats
Complement the BIA with a risk assessment that identifies potential events capable of disrupting those critical functions. Consider both:
- External threats, such as natural disasters, supply chain failure, or regulatory sanctions
- Internal threats, such as data breaches, key staff unavailability, or equipment failure
Don’t limit your view to what’s happened before, use horizon scanning to anticipate emerging risks, including those linked to climate change or political volatility.
3. Define recovery strategies
Once risks and critical functions are mapped, define how you’ll recover them. This may involve:
- Manual workarounds to support operations during outages
- Alternate suppliers and delivery channels
- Relocation of teams or services
- Redundancy in systems and personnel
Recovery strategies should be realistic, cost-effective, and integrated with other response plans such as crisis management or IT disaster recovery.
4. Establish communication protocols
A well-coordinated response depends on clear, timely communication. Your BCP should detail:
- Internal escalation and decision-making chains
- Communication roles and responsibilities
- Pre-drafted messages for customers, regulators, and media
- Redundant communication channels to ensure reach in all scenarios
In the chaos of a crisis, clarity and confidence are critical, and they don’t happen without preparation.
5. Train, test, and continuously improve
BCPs are living documents. They must evolve alongside your organization’s risk profile, business structure, and operating environment.
Use a blend of training formats, awareness sessions, role-specific briefings, tabletop exercises, and full simulations, to ensure everyone knows their role. After each exercise or real-world event, conduct post-incident reviews to identify improvements and update the plan accordingly.
The role of technology in modern BCM
Technology plays a dual role in BCM: it introduces risk (e.g. via cyber threats), but it also offers powerful solutions for managing resilience.
Enterprise software for BCM and risk management
Specialist BCM platforms and enterprise risk software can enhance the maturity of your program by:
- Centralizing plan documentation and access.
- Enabling cross-functional collaboration.
- Automating risk assessments and plan updates.
- Tracking compliance with BCM standards and policies.
- Providing dashboards and reports for oversight and assurance.
While spreadsheets and static documents can suffice early on, growing organizations often require more integrated, scalable systems to keep pace with complexity.
Tying BCM to IT disaster recovery
IT systems are often the backbone of critical business functions. Effective BCM must integrate with IT disaster recovery (ITDR) strategies, ensuring alignment between operational continuity and system restoration.
This includes:
- Synchronized recovery time objectives (RTOs).
- Joint testing of infrastructure and business processes.
- Shared prioritization frameworks between IT and business leaders.
Integration between BCM and ITDR eliminates silos and reduces recovery gaps.
Addressing cyber risk through continuity planning
Cyber incidents, such as ransomware or data breaches, are among the most common and disruptive events today.
Your BCM strategy should account for:
- Alternative access methods during IT outages.
- Workarounds for key digital processes.
- Predefined responses to data integrity or privacy breaches.
- Coordination with cybersecurity teams and incident response plans.
Continuity and cyber resilience are now inseparable.
Future-proofing continuity
As the nature of risk continues to evolve, so too must business continuity management. What was sufficient five years ago may be wholly inadequate today. Resilience planning is no longer just about ticking regulatory boxes, it’s about building adaptive capacity into every layer of the organization.
Future-focused BCM strategies must account for geographic variation, shifts in the way we work, and the growing urgency of climate-related risk. Here are three key areas of change shaping the future of business continuity.
Considering global and sector-specific contexts
Business continuity cannot be treated as a generic exercise. Regional risks, regulatory environments, and cultural expectations all influence how continuity planning is developed and executed.
Take Japan, for example, long exposed to severe natural disasters, the country has embedded business continuity deeply into its corporate culture. Decentralized strategies, comprehensive scenario testing, and all-staff drills are standard practice, making Japanese organizations some of the most prepared in the world. Their approach highlights the importance of localized, culturally informed planning.
In contrast, organizations in other geographies may be less attuned to region-specific risks or may underestimate dependencies, particularly when operations span multiple countries or rely heavily on third-party services.
Industry dynamics also play a critical role. In banking, even a short disruption can undermine consumer trust, attract regulatory penalties, and impact financial stability. Business continuity plans in this sector must align with strict obligations around data integrity, uptime, and liquidity.
Meanwhile, healthcare providers face non-negotiable imperatives to sustain patient care during crises, placing life-critical services, medical logistics, and digital infrastructure at the centre of continuity planning. Educational institutions must support hybrid learning environments and data security, while public sector organizations are tasked with maintaining essential services and public communication under high scrutiny.
Whether shaped by local hazards or sector expectations, BCM strategies that account for context are significantly more resilient in practice.
Remote and hybrid work models
The widespread shift to remote and hybrid working models has redefined continuity expectations. No longer confined to centralized offices or data centres, critical operations are now distributed across homes, co-working spaces, and cloud environments.
Effective BCM must reflect this decentralization. Plans should account for:
- Secure remote access to systems and communication channels
- Hardware provisioning and maintenance for off-site employees
- Cybersecurity controls adapted to remote environments, including multi-factor authentication and secure VPNs
- Employee well-being, recognizing the human dimension of long-duration remote response scenarios
Moreover, continuity testing must evolve beyond in-office simulations. organizations should routinely stress-test response protocols under remote and hybrid configurations, ensuring that recovery doesn’t rely on outdated assumptions about where work gets done.
Climate risk as a core continuity concern
Climate change is no longer a hypothetical risk, it’s a material threat affecting infrastructure, supply chains, and operational continuity. From wildfires and floods to heatwaves and rising sea levels, climate-driven events are growing in both frequency and severity.
To remain resilient, organizations must bring environmental risk into the heart of their BCM programs.
This means:
- Mapping physical and digital asset exposures to climate-related hazards
- Incorporating climate risk scenarios into continuity planning and enterprise risk registers
- Engaging with sustainability and facilities teams to align operational resilience with environmental strategy
Forward-thinking organizations are also adopting climate-informed continuity metrics, tracking readiness for events such as grid failures, extreme weather evacuations, or prolonged environmental degradation
Conclusions and next steps for your organization
Business Continuity Management is no longer just about surviving the next disruption: it’s about building an organization that can recover faster, adapt smarter, and continue delivering value under pressure. Whether you’re navigating regional threats, hybrid workforces, or escalating climate risk, your continuity plan is only as strong as your visibility, alignment, and execution.
That’s where Protecht comes in.
Our Operational resilience and business continuity management solution gives you the tools to visualize, test, and improve your resilience across every critical operation, system, and resource. From impact assessments and scenario testing to structured dashboards and real-time reporting, Protecht helps you prove your resilience and progress your business.
You’ll gain:
- End-to-end visibility of your critical services and interdependencies.
- Integrated planning across risk, compliance, IT, and third-party domains.
- Automation and insight to meet growing regulatory demands, including APRA CPS 230.
- Confidence that your business continuity and operational resilience programs are aligned, tested, and ready.
Request a demo today and see how Protecht can help you operationalize resilience at scale – and turn continuity from a reactive obligation into a strategic advantage:
References
[1] ISO 22301:2019 – Security and resilience – Business continuity management systems – Requirements.
URL: https://www.iso.org/standard/75106.html
[2] Business Continuity Institute – Good Practice Guidelines 2018 Edition.
URL: https://www.thebci.org/product/good-practice-guidelines-2018-edition.html
[3] Japan Cabinet Office – Business Continuity Guidelines (English Summary).
URL: https://www.bousai.go.jp/1info/pdf/Guideline_Eng.pdf
[4] FEMA Continuity Guidance Circular (CGC), 2018.
URL: https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/national-preparedness/continuity/guidance-circular