Time to read: 7 minutes 53 seconds | Published: August 21, 2025
Business continuity planning What is a business continuity disaster recovery plan?
A business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) plan is a strategic framework that enables organizations to maintain or quickly resume mission-critical operations following a disruption. It bridges emergency response and recovery by outlining how key business processes, personnel, IT systems, and supply chains will operate in the face of both anticipated and unforeseen events.
At its core, business continuity planning is about resilience—not just recovering from disaster, but continuing operations through it with minimal impact. A strong business continuity plan (BCP) identifies vulnerabilities, prioritizes essential functions, and aligns people, processes, and technologies around a coordinated response.
Start with a Business Impact Analysis
Creating a business continuity plan begins with a business impact analysis (BIA)—an in-depth evaluation of how various types of disruptions could affect your operations. This includes assessing dependencies across infrastructure, applications, supply chains, data, and personnel.
The BIA informs the definition of key recovery metrics:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The targeted duration within which systems and processes must be restored
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum tolerable amount of data loss, measured in time
- Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD): The longest acceptable period a process can be unavailable without causing significant harm
- Maximum Tolerable Data Loss (MTDL): The greatest data loss a business function can endure before it results in unacceptable consequences
These metrics drive the creation of service level agreements (SLAs) and guide the selection of recovery strategies.
Business continuity planning also relies on understanding two less commonly discussed, yet crucial metrics: Incident Response Time (IRT) and Operational Resumption Time (ORT).
- Incident Response Time (IRT) refers to the time elapsed between the onset of a disruption and the activation of the business continuity or disaster recovery plan. Quick identification and response can significantly limit damage.
- Operational Resumption Time (ORT) represents the time needed to restore full functionality after systems are back online. This includes processes like employee re-engagement, re-syncing applications, and re-establishing external integrations.
Business Continuity Plan for the unexpected
A business continuity plan helps organizations deal with both unplanned disruptions—such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, or system failures—and planned outages, like maintenance or upgrades. Plans often include:
- Redundant systems and failover infrastructure
- Workplace recovery and remote access procedures
- Data protection and disaster recovery strategies
- Cybersecurity and cyber recovery strategies
- Crisis communication plans and decision-making hierarchies
It's not just about restoring technology—it’s about ensuring that critical services continue to operate while full restoration efforts are underway.
IT operations rely on technologies like high availability (HA) storage, server clustering, load balancing, security information and event management systems, cyber vaulting, immutable backups, continuous data protection, and automated failover. These measures are essential for minimizing downtime and preserving data integrity across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Test, maintain, update your BCP
Business continuity planning is not a one-time event. To be effective, a BCP must be:
- Tested regularly through drills and simulations
- Updated continually to reflect changes in technology, personnel, or business priorities
- Owned collaboratively by a cross-functional business continuity management team (BCMT) that spans IT, HR, operations, compliance, and executive leadership.
Without continuous investment in testing and refinement, a business continuity plan can become the weak link in an otherwise robust risk management strategy.
How are business continuity plans evolving?
Historically, the BCP focused on operational recovery. But modern threats—like ransomware, pandemics, and climate change—have driven a shift toward more agile, resilient strategies. Business continuity planning now requires:
- Scalable infrastructure that supports remote access and dynamic workloads
- Built-in cybersecurity across every access point
- Coordination across physical, digital, and cloud environments
Organizations must also prepare for simultaneous disruptions affecting both IT systems and business functions. As such, disaster recovery (DR) has evolved into just one component of broader continuity planning.
Why is a business continuity plan important?
To remain successful, resilient companies prepare to handle disruptive events and keep operations running with business continuity planning. With a formal business continuity plan, organizations ensure that they can continue to function under any circumstances. Being prepared in advance can mean the difference between being able to restart operations and coming to a standstill.
The absence of a business continuity plan can be catastrophic. Downtime—whether minutes or days—can lead to lost revenue, reputational harm, and even business closure. Without preparation, companies may find themselves unable to recover.
A comprehensive BCP ensures:
- Product and service delivery continues
- Employees remain safe and productive
- Brand reputation is protected
- The organization meets regulatory and contractual obligations
Business continuity vs. disaster recovery vs. cyber recovery
While closely related, business continuity, disaster recovery, and cyber recovery address different facets of operational resilience:
- Business continuity encompasses all aspects of keeping operations running during disruptions
- Disaster recovery is focused on restoring IT systems and data after an outage, whether caused by a natural disaster or system failure
- Cyber recovery has the same goal as disaster recovery but is specifically tailored to intentional disruptions caused by cyberattacks such as ransomware. It includes secure, immutable backups, air-gapped recovery vaults, and automated restore capabilities.
A comprehensive BCDR plan incorporates all three approaches to provide both breadth and depth in recovery strategies.
Criticality Rating as a means of triaging business functions
One of the most impactful outcomes of a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is the Criticality Rating assigned to business functions. This framework helps organizations triage recovery efforts based on urgency and impact.
A typical 4-tiered scale includes:
- Tier 1: Critical Functions–Must be restored within minutes to hours to avoid major disruption
- Tier 2: Essential Functions–Should be restored within 24–72 hours
- Tier 3: Necessary Functions–Recovery can be delayed up to a week without serious impact
- Tier 4: Desirable Functions–Can be restored over an extended timeline without major consequences
Examples by function:
- The ability to process financial transactions is critical in the financial sector, where even brief downtime impacts revenue and trust.
- Access to electronic health records (EHRs) is critical in healthcare, where life-and-death decisions depend on real-time data.
- The ability to manage online orders and customer service tickets is critical in e-commerce and retail, where customer satisfaction and revenue flow depend on continuity.
Cybersecurity as a proactive pillar of continuity
While recovery is reactive by nature, cybersecurity is proactive – focusing on threat prevention, detection, and response. Modern business continuity planning must integrate cybersecurity at every layer, including:
- Network and endpoint security
- Multi-factor authentication and access control
- Data encryption and secure backup
- Security operations center (SOC) integration.
Cybersecurity is a key component of business continuity that prevents disruptions before they happen. Combining cybersecurity with cyber recovery provides proactive and reactive continuity to address both known and unknown cyber threats.
What is the difference between business continuity and business resilience
Business continuity focuses on maintaining operations during disruption, while business resilience is about adapting and evolving in the face of long-term challenges. A mature continuity plan is the foundation for building organizational resilience across IT, operations, supply chains, and workforce models.
How does technology help ensure business continuity?
Technology is at the heart of modern business continuity. From healthcare to education to small business, organizations are adopting digital strategies that support both day-to-day operations and emergency preparedness. Examples include:
- Cloud-native platforms for secure remote access
- Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for distributed teams
- High-availability storage and clustering for zero-interruption uptime
- Continuous data protection (CDP) and backup automation
- Monitoring and orchestration tools that trigger instant recovery workflows
The ultimate outcome of business continuity assessment and follow-up is a shift to a new normal driving innovation and breakthrough, and sometimes even leading to new business models.
How is business continuity secured with HPE?
Hewlett Packard Enterprise helps support operations and business productivity and planning and execution services to speed business results. Take advantage of HPE’s decades-long experience with infrastructure and explore their solutions below:
Pre-configured HPE ProLiant ML and DL servers and software are easy to deploy. HPE Integrated Lights Out (iLO) server management software enables local and remote monitoring and management.
As-a-service models offer the flexibility of cloud with the control, security, and reliability found in on-premises data centers. HPE offers a market-leading IT-as-a-service offering that brings the cloud experience to your on-premises infrastructure with HPE GreenLake.
Small businesses can find several options to deploy virtualized desk interfaces and implement centralized storage and security, data protection, 24x7 availability, and optional archiving and disaster recovery storage. At HPE, our server virtualization solutions are built on HPE ProLiant servers with scalable and optimized processors.
Strengthen cyber resilience, disaster recovery, and continuous data protection to radically reduce data loss and downtime with HPE Zerto Software. Defend your business with industry-leading RPOs and RTOs that minimize data loss and downtime from disasters, cyberattacks, and migrations.
Safeguard your data and business operations against the growing threat of cyberattacks with the HPE Cyber Resilience Vault. Architect and customize an ironclad recovery vault designed to mitigate even the most devastating ransomware attacks.
Modernize your enterprise block and file storage with AI-driven cloud management, disaggregated scaling, and 100% data availability for all your workloads. The HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 provides on-array intelligent ransomware detection and recovery technologies to help ensure your data remains resilient against ransomware attacks.
Deploy a flexible HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 solution that enables as much as 20x data reduction, along with protected, compliant, secure, and available data.
Build a robust foundation for cyber resilience with HPE StoreOnce Systems. Transform your hybrid cloud protection with greater simplicity, higher performance, and built-in protection from threats and malware—all at a lower cost than traditional backup solutions.
To protect against ransomware attacks, the air-gapped security of tape-based backups with HPE Storage Tape provide significant advantages as secure, scalable, low-cost storage solutions.
With solutions like these, you can be prepared for the threat of a shutdown with secure and reliable access to data with infrastructure and software that take into account the complexity and diversity of the infrastructure and variability of demand. HPE solutions allow you to assess evolving developments and find technology that can help with operational process sufficiency.