Organizations are seeing a more threatening and volatile operating environment.

Executives report an increase in risks across multiple areas, including cyber-enabled fraud, phishing, and supply chain disruptions, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Cybersecurity Outlook report.

At the same time executives are increasingly worried about how artificial intelligence, digital interdependencies, geopolitics, and today’s complex operating environment increase risk to securing their organization’s technology and ensuring business continuity.

Two-thirds (66%) of organizations have increased financial or resource support for business continuity and resilience in response, according to the 2025 State of Continuity and Resilience report from the Business Continuity Institute.

Even so, business leaders are bracing for increasingly more frequent impactful incidents, making a solid business continuity plan more critical than ever.

“Every business should have the mindset that they will face a disaster, and every business needs a plan to address the different potential scenarios,” says Goh Ser Yoong, CISO at Ryt Bank and a member of the Emerging Trends Working Group at ISACA.

A business continuity plan gives organizations the best shot at navigating a disaster by providing ready-made directions on who should do what tasks in what order to keep the business viable.

Without such a plan, the organization will take longer than necessary to recover from an event or incident — if it recovers at all.

What is a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a strategic playbook created to help an organization maintain or quickly resume business functions in the face of disruption, whether it is caused by a natural disaster, civic unrest, cyberattack, or any other threat to business operations.

“Continuity is about knowing the minimum time or loss an organization can absorb and still be viable and conduct business. It’s about how quickly it can come back up before it gets bad for its clientele or business, and what systems and processes it has to bring back up and in what order,” says Matt Chevraux, managing director of FTI Consulting.

As such, a business continuity plan outlines the procedures the organization must follow to minimize downtime, covering business processes, assets, human resources, business partners, and more.

A business continuity plan is not the same as a disaster recovery plan, which focuses on restoring IT infrastructure and operations after a crisis. Still, a disaster recovery plan is part of the overall strategy to ensure business continuity, and the business continuity plan should inform the action items detailed in an organization’s disaster recovery plan. The two are tightly coupled, which is why they often are linked together as BCDR.

Business continuity differs from resilience, too, although they are also interrelated. Business continuity focuses on restoring operations in the event of a disruption, whereas business resilience speaks to an organization’s strategy for responding to all sorts of internal and external forces to ensure its long-term survival and success.

Elements of business continuity planning today

Disruptive events are inevitable, according to researchers, risk leaders, and executive advisers.

“Gone are the days when organizations used business continuity or resilience programs as a kind of insurance in case something failed. Now, organizations must face the reality; it’s only a matter of time until a catastrophic incident occurs and affects customers,” Forrester Research writes in its Business Continuity Management Software Landscape, Q1 2026 report.

Executives are not only operating in an environment where the risk of a catastrophic incident is not-an-if-but-when scenario, they’re also working in a world where the complexity of business operations has increased dramatically.

Now organizations must consider as part of their continuity plans a growing volume of AI uses, vendors, and third parties’ digital connections, says Ross Tisnovsky, a partner at Everest Group and leader of the firm’s CIO research and advisory practice.

For example, plans today must address AI availability as well as its accuracy and its cyber risks, such as the threat of prompt injection attacks, he explains, noting that today’s continuity plan must account for more novel concerns. “The concern with infrastructure and applications was availability, but what if AI is giving you junk? That degrading quality of output is a continuity concern.”

Similarly, organizations must evaluate and address their ever-growing operational reliance on third parties, whether they’re hyperscalers or LLM providers, a factor that also adds more complexity to business continuity plans, Tisnovsky says.

“We now have all these providers, and on top of it we’re relying on APIs and the service mesh way more. We’re relying on potential connections we don’t even know about it,” he explains. “That can create exposure you cannot control.”

All these considerations are in addition to the myriad conventional risks that a business continuity plan has always had to address, Tisnovsky adds.

Building (and updating) a business continuity plan

Whether building the organization’s first business continuity plan or updating an existing one, the process involves multiple essential steps.

Assess business processes for criticality and vulnerability: Business continuity planning starts with understanding what’s most important to the business. Assess business processes to determine which are the most critical; which are the most vulnerable and to what type of events; and what are the potential losses if those processes go down for a day, a few days, a week, or more.

“Start with a business impact analysis: What are the critical things that make the business run,” says Lawrence Bilker, CIO of Lift Solutions Holdings. “Identify the business processes and systems that make the company work.”

This assessment is more demanding than ever due to the complexity of today’s hybrid workplace, the modern IT environment, and reliance on business partners and third-party providers to perform or support critical processes.

As a result, assessment requires an inventory of not only key processes but supporting components — including IT systems, networks, people, and outside vendors — as well as the risks to those components, Goh says.

Determine your organization’s RTO and RPO: The next step is determining the organization’s recovery time objective (RTO), which is the target amount of time between point of failure and the resumption of operations, and the recovery point objective (RPO), which is the maximum amount of data loss an organization can withstand.

Each organization has its own RTO and RPO based its business, industry, regulatory requirements, and other operational factors. Moreover, different parts of a business can have different RTOs and RPOs, which executives must establish.

Some businesses “need to be up all the time without fail, and so they need high availability in place, meaning one or two backups,” Bilker says.

Detail the steps, roles, and responsibilities for continuity: Business leaders should then use RTO and RPO, along with their business impact analysis, to determine specific tasks that need to happen, by whom, and in what order to ensure business continuity.

One common business continuity planning tool is a checklist that includes supplies and equipment, the location of data backups and backup sites, where the plan is available and who should have it, and contact information for emergency responders, key personnel, and backup site providers.

There’s no need to identify every possible risk to the organization when building or updating a business continuity plan, says Kayne McGladrey, a senior member of nonprofit professional association IEEE.

The list of possible impact scenarios is extensive. Instead of trying to identify them all, McGladrey advises identifying the most likely and most representative types of incidents and then focusing on how such incidents could impact the business. From there, leaders must determine what impacts would be intolerable based on the organization’s risk tolerance.

“Think about business risks, not the technical risks and not causes, but the impacts on the business,” McGladrey says.

The objective, he stresses, is to create a business continuity plan capable of instructing the organization on how to recover from an unexpected event of any kind.

The importance of testing the business continuity plan

Testing and practicing are other critical components of business continuity planning, as they show whether or how well a plan will work. They also help prepare stakeholders for an actual incident, building muscle memory to respond quickly and confidently during a crisis.

“Testing and training for people are critical so everyone knows what to do in an event of a failure,” Bilker says.

They also help identify gaps in the devised plan. For instance, Bilker says testing and training could uncover the lack of backups or alternatives to critical systems, providers, or people.

Additionally, testing and training help identify where there may be misalignment of objectives. For example, executives may have deprioritized the importance of restoring certain IT systems only to realize during a drill that those are essential for supporting critical processes.

Types and timing of tests

Many organizations test a business continuity plan two to four times a year. Experts say the frequency of tests, as well as reviews and updates, depends on the organization — its industry, its speed of innovation and transformation, the amount of turnover of key personnel, the number of business processes, and so on.

Common tests include tabletop exercises, structured walk-throughs, and simulations. Test teams are usually composed of the recovery coordinator and members from each functional unit.

A tabletop exercise usually occurs in a conference room with the team poring over the plan, looking for gaps and ensuring business units are represented.

In a structured walk-through, team members walk through their components of the plan in detail to identify weaknesses. Often, the team works through the test with a specific disaster in mind. Some organizations incorporate drills and disaster role-playing into the structured walk-through. Any weaknesses should be corrected and an updated plan distributed to all pertinent staff.

Some experts advise a full emergency evacuation drill at least once a year.

Disaster simulation testing — which can be quite involved — should also be performed annually. For this test, create an environment that simulates an actual disaster, with all the equipment, supplies, and personnel (including business partners and vendors) who would be needed. The simulation helps determine whether the organization can carry out critical business functions during an actual event.

During each phase of business continuity plan testing, include some new employees on the test team. A pair of fresh eyes might detect gaps or lapses of information that experienced team members could overlook.

Reviewing and updating the business continuity plan should be an ongoing process. Otherwise, plans go stale and are of no use when needed.

“How often it needs to be updated should be driven by the business,” Tisnovsky says.

Bring key personnel together at least annually to review the plan and discuss areas that require modification.

Prior to the review, solicit feedback from staff to incorporate into the plan. Ask all departments or business units to review the plan, including branch locations or other remote units.

Furthermore, a strong business continuity function calls for reviewing the organization’s response in the event of an actual event. This allows executives and their teams to identify what the organization did well and where it needs to improve.

Additional best practices

According to management advisers and experienced executives, the following best practices can help organizations with their business continuity planning:

Use AI to help build and maintain the plan: Zach Rossmiller, associate vice president and CIO of the University of Montana, uses a customized generative AI tool to analyze the organization’s processes, procedures, infrastructure, and architecture as well as its business continuity plan to identify potential gaps, such as the need to test generators for the university’s data center. Given the tool’s performance, Rossmiller advises others to use AI for business continuity planning and testing. Chevraux says AI can also be used for data discovery, mapping, and conducting business impact assessments.

Meanwhile, Bilker stresses the importance of including communications plans as part of the business continuity plan.

“It’s difficult during an incident to remember who gets what information when and who distributes information, so the business continuity plan should outline that information,” he says.

Similarly, the plan should identify who owns what roles and responsibilities during and after an incident to speed response and reduce confusion.

Bilker also advises organizations to revisit their continuity plans any time there is a major change to the business. Entering new markets or switching from a key cloud provider to another should trigger an update to business continuity plan.

How to ensure business continuity plan support and awareness

Every business continuity plan must be supported from the top down. That means senior management must be represented when creating and updating the plan; no one can delegate that responsibility to subordinates. In addition, the plan is likely to remain fresh and viable if senior management makes it a priority by dedicating time for adequate review and testing.

Management is also key to promoting user awareness. If employees don’t know about the plan, how will they be able to react appropriately when every minute counts?

Although plan distribution and training can be conducted by business unit managers or HR staff, have someone from the top kick off training and punctuate its significance. It’ll have a greater impact on all employees, giving the plan more credibility and urgency.