Business Continuity
Also known as: BC, Business Resilience
A business's ability to maintain essential functions before, during, and after a disruptive event, including cyberattacks, system failures, or natural disasters.
Definition
Business continuity encompasses the planning, systems, and procedures that allow a business to keep operating through disruptive events. In the digital context, this includes maintaining website uptime, data accessibility, communication systems, and payment processing during and after incidents.
A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) documents how the business will respond to defined scenarios: what systems must be restored first, who is responsible for recovery decisions, how customers are notified, and what the target recovery time is. Most businesses do not have documented BCPs, which turns recoverable incidents into catastrophic ones.
A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) documents how the business will respond to defined scenarios: what systems must be restored first, who is responsible for recovery decisions, how customers are notified, and what the target recovery time is. Most businesses do not have documented BCPs, which turns recoverable incidents into catastrophic ones.
Example
A hosting provider has a major outage affecting a retailer's e-commerce site. A business with a continuity plan activates a pre-configured failover server within 2 hours, limiting revenue loss to a predictable amount. A business without a plan spends 48 hours in crisis mode while engineers scramble to understand their own system.
Important Distinctions
Business continuity is distinct from disaster recovery. Disaster recovery focuses on restoring IT systems after failure. Business continuity is broader, covering all functions needed to keep the business operating, including people, processes, and communication, not just technology.