Free Business Continuity Plan

Download our free Business Continuity Plan (BCP) template to start documenting your business continuity arrangements.

What Is a Business Continuity Plan?

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a structured document outlining how an organization will continue operating during and after unexpected disruptions. This can include cyberattacks, natural disasters, and other major incidents.

The goal is to sustain essential business functions, minimize downtime, and recover quickly to safeguard reputation and financial stability.

Why Does a Business Continuity Plan Matter for US Businesses?

The business landscape in the US is increasingly recognizing the importance of robust business continuity planning, reflecting heightened awareness of operational risks and disruptions.

Recent data from Invenio IT illustrates how organizations of all sizes are prioritizing resilience strategies to prepare for and respond effectively to potential interruptions.

84% of businesses report an increase in network outages over recent years, underscoring growing operational threats that continuity planning must address.
91% of businesses experience network outages at least quarterly, illustrating the prevalence of disruptions that continuity planning seeks to mitigate.
Cyberattacks continue to pose a significant continuity challenge, with external actors accounting for 81% of data breach threats—data breaches often trigger continuity activations.
Downtime costs are substantial—SMBs lose on average, $427 per minute of downtime, and larger enterprises can lose up to $9,000 per minute, highlighting the financial stakes of continuity planning.

These trends highlight why business continuity planning has become so vital—it enables organizations to maintain critical operations during disruptions, reducing downtime and financial impact. It can also strengthen overall resilience by helping teams prepare to respond swiftly and effectively to unexpected events such as cyberattacks, system failures or supply chain interruptions.

When Would a Business Continuity Plan Have Been Useful in 2025?

The Amazon Web Services outage in October 2025 highlighted the value of a well-structured Business Continuity Plan.

The Amazon Web Services outage, originating in the key US-EAST-1 cloud region, disrupted services for thousands of companies worldwide, highlighting how dependent modern businesses are on cloud infrastructure and the importance of continuity planning when critical providers suffer outages.

This kind of large-scale disruption demonstrates how continuity measures—such as multi-cloud strategies, offsite data backup, and rehearsed failover procedures—can help organizations maintain essential services and recover efficiently during unexpected events.

Components to consider when building a business continuity plan:

A robust Business Continuity Plan typically includes:

Business impact analysis: Identifies critical activities and recovery timeframes
Risk assessment: Pinpoints threats and vulnerabilities
Continuity strategies: Defines how operations will be maintained or recovered
Incident response: Sets out roles, responsibilities, and escalation paths
Recovery procedures: Details step-by-step actions to resume key services
Communication plans: Covers internal and external messaging during disruption
Testing and review: Ensures the plan works and stays up to date

How Does a Disaster Recovery Plan Compare to a Business Continuity Plan?

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) works as a critical subset within the broader Business Continuity Plan. The BCP is the overarching strategy focused on keeping all essential business functions running during and after a disruption, while the DRP specifically covers the procedures and technologies required to recover IT systems and data.

Aspect	Business Continuity Plan (BCP)	Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)
Scope	Broad: all critical business functions	Narrow: IT systems and data recovery
Focus	Keeping business operational during disruption	Recovering systems after disruption
Timing	Activated immediately at disruption onset	Activated after the disaster to restore systems
Components	Risk assessment, impact analysis, response, communication, contingencies	Backup, recovery technologies, RTO, restoration procedures
Goal	Minimize downtime and keep business running	Restore the IT infrastructure and data quickly

What’s the Difference Between a Business Continuity Plan and a Business Continuity Policy?

A Business Continuity Policy should work to explain an organization’s general approach to staying resilient—what the organization aims to protect, who is responsible and why continuity matters. One the flip side of this, a Business Continuity Plan is the practical document that shows exactly what to do during a disruption, including who to contact, how to keep key services running and how to recover quickly.

What ISO Standards Does a Business Continuity Plan Relate To?

A BCP mainly supports the ISO 22301 Standard, but it also links to related standards that cover impact analysis, supply chain resilience, IT continuity and incident response, including ISO 27001.

Together, these standards help build a complete and structured approach to keeping the business running during disruptions.

How Does ISO 22301 and a Business Continuity Plan Work Together?

A Business Continuity Plan can link to the practical requirements in ISO 22301:2019 Clause 8, which focuses on how an organization prepares for and responds to disruptions.

This part of the standard requires businesses to have clear, written procedures for what to do in an incident, who is responsible, how communication will work and how key activities will continue. It also requires organizations to test and update these plans regularly.