Business continuity planning is required for any organisation that wants to stay operational. Without a plan, even minor outages can lead to serious financial loss and reputational damage.
Medium-sized businesses can face serious problems when disruptions occur. Operations rely on consistent access to systems and data. Without a clear business continuity plan (BCP), recovery can be slow and clients may be affected.
From ransomware to network outages or a flooded office, disruptions can happen at any time. A strong plan ensures your business can adapt quickly and keep delivering, regardless of what is thrown at it.
This guide will walk you through what business continuity planning involves, why it matters, and how to build a practical, tailored plan that protects your operations from disruption.
What Is Business Continuity Planning?
Business continuity planning is the process of preparing your business to continue operating through unplanned disruptions. A good BCP does more than guess how things might go wrong: it sets up plans and ensures a structure is in place before anything bad happens.
Business continuity planning helps your business
- Stay operational during disruptions: Even when the office is inaccessible or systems are offline, your teams can continue working.
- Reduce downtime and revenue loss: By planning ahead, you avoid costly delays that affect projects, clients, and cash flow.
- Maintain compliance and data integrity: Critical for any business handling sensitive information or working within regulated environments.
- Improve team readiness: Staff know what to do, who to contact, and how to keep key functions running.
- Build trust with clients and stakeholders: a business that continues delivering under pressure stands out for the right reasons.
For businesses looking to follow best practices, standards like ISO 22301 outline how to build and maintain a proper business continuity framework. And if you’re in a regulated industry, it also strengthens your position on compliance, including under Australia’s Privacy Act.
The ultimate goal of business continuity planning is simple. You want to ensure your business can keep moving forward, no matter what’s happening around it.
Nonetheless, many people still confuse business continuity with disaster recovery. While related, they have distinct purposes:
- Business continuity planning: Ensures your business can keep running during a disruptive event.
- Disaster recovery: Focuses on restoring IT systems and data after the disruption has happened.
Used together, they keep your business functional during a crisis and restore your systems afterwards.
Of course, there are many Cyber Security Services you can use to protect your business, such as Data Protection Services.
Key Elements of a Business Continuity Plan
Now you know the broad benefits, the next step is understanding what a strong business continuity plan actually includes. You need to create a system for keeping your business operational when something goes wrong.
Here are four essential components every plan should cover.
1. Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis
Effective continuity planning starts with two key steps: assessing your risks and understanding their impact.
Start with a risk assessment. This identifies potential threats to your operations, such as cyberattacks, power outages, natural disasters or system failures.
Ask:
What types of events could impact operations?
Think broadly: technology failures, data loss, supply chain issues or extreme weather.
Where are we most vulnerable?
Look at critical systems, single points of failure, remote access and reliance on third-party providers.
How likely is each risk, and how severe would the impact be?
Prioritise based on both probability and potential business disruption. This helps guide where to focus your resources.
Next, conduct a business impact analysis (BIA). This examines the potential effects if those threats came to fruition. It identifies which business functions are most critical and how long you can afford for each to be offline.
Ask:
What are the most time-sensitive activities across departments?
Identify which processes need to be running immediately after a disruption. This could be things like payroll, invoicing, customer comms or project delivery.
How long can we afford to be without access to these?
Every function has a threshold. Some systems can be down for days without major impact, while others need to be back online within hours. This determines your recovery time objectives (RTOs).
What financial, legal or operational risks would downtime cause?
Consider lost revenue, breach of contract, client trust or regulatory penalties. This helps prioritise continuity strategies by real-world consequence.
Understanding your risks and how they affect your operations helps you decide what actually needs protection. It brings structure to your planning and ensures your effort goes toward the most critical areas.
2. Continuity and Recovery Strategies
Once you’ve assessed the risks, you need practical strategies for both staying operational during a disruption and restoring full functionality afterwards.
Your continuity and recovery strategies should address:
Alternative work arrangements
Staff need to be able to access systems securely from home or a secondary site if the main office becomes unavailable. This keeps operations moving even when the physical workplace is out of action.
Communication protocols during disruption
Clear communication protocols keep teams aligned during disruption. When everyone knows who to contact and how, decisions get made faster and work can continue.
Cloud backups and system failovers
Regular cloud-based backups mean data isn’t lost if on-site systems fail. A failover system, whether cloud-hosted or hybrid, allows applications to be restored quickly.
Data recovery processes
Documented procedures for restoring files, applications, and infrastructure ensure a structured, timely recovery. This reduces guesswork and speeds up the return to normal operations.
Still relying on on-premises systems? Shifting critical infrastructure to the cloud improves flexibility and cuts recovery time. Securing Multi-Cloud: Cyber Security Best Practices explores how to protect those systems once they’re online.
3. Clear Documentation and Contact Information
A business continuity plan only works if it’s written down and accessible to the right people.
Your documentation should include:
Step-by-step plans for restoring critical business functions
Outline exactly what needs to be brought back online, in what order, and how. This ensures teams aren’t improvising under pressure and reduces costly delays in recovery.
Clear roles and responsibilities
Assign specific people to specific tasks: from initiating failover procedures to communicating with clients. Everyone should know their job, not wait for instructions mid-crisis.
Contact information for IT leads, vendors, facilities managers, and department heads
A centralised, up-to-date list of key contacts means there’s no scrambling for phone numbers when time is tight. Include backups in case someone is unavailable.
Details on how to access recovery tools, offsite data, or Cloud Computing environments
Your team should know exactly where to find critical systems and how to log in, especially if they're working remotely or from unfamiliar setups. Secure cloud access makes this faster and safer.
This should be version-controlled, regularly updated, and stored in multiple secure locations.
Need help formalising it? IT Consulting Services support businesses in documenting realistic, audit-ready continuity plans.
4. How to Communicate Clearly During a Crisis
A clear chain of communication is vital when systems are down or clients are waiting for updates.
Your plan should include:
Internal communication templates for different scenarios
Have pre-prepared messages ready for incidents like system outages, cyber incidents, or office closures. This keeps staff informed and aligned without wasting time drafting from scratch.
Designated staff to lead crisis communication and escalation
Assign specific people to take charge of internal updates and escalation. Everyone should know who is coordinating the response.
A clear structure for crisis management meetings and decision-making
Define how the team comes together during a disruption, including who attends, what gets prioritised, and how decisions are finalised.
Pre-approved messaging for clients, regulators, and partners
Draft key statements in advance for external stakeholders. This avoids delays and ensures compliance during high-pressure situations.
This means consistent, confident messaging, even when pressure is high and decisions need to be made fast.
Each of these four components discussed supports the others. Together, they form a business continuity plan that’s usable and effective when disruption strikes.
Step-by-Step: Creating a Business Continuity Plan
Now that you understand the key components of a BCP, it’s time to bring them together in a practical, usable process.
This step-by-step process is designed for medium-sized businesses. It focuses on the essentials that keep operations running during disruptions.
Step 1: Identify Critical Business Functions
Start by mapping out what absolutely must continue if operations are disrupted.
Think beyond departments. Focus on specific business processes and deliverables. For example, you may need uninterrupted access to customer records, financial systems, communications platforms, or job tracking tools.
How to do it:
- List all business functions across your organisation
- Identify which are necessary for revenue, compliance, and customer service
- Determine how long each can be unavailable without major impact
- Assign each a priority rating
Accountants, for example, require client data access and ATO lodgements. Secure document exchange platforms are often the top priorities as well. See more in Benefits of Managed IT Services for SMB Accountants in 2025.
Step 2: Assess Risks and Vulnerabilities
Once you know what needs protecting, look at what could disrupt it.
These won’t be the same for every business. Office-based teams may be vulnerable to power outages or system failures. Field teams may be more affected by natural disasters, mobile connectivity issues, or equipment theft.
Common risks to assess:
- Local events such as power failures, hardware damage or restricted building access
- Wider disruptions including extreme weather, flooding, cyberattacks or service provider outages
- Human-related risks like accidental deletion, phishing attempts or unauthorised access
- Regulatory risks resulting from an inability to meet compliance obligations during a disruption
Compliance applies to a broad range of things that affect your business. Learn more with Financial Compliance: Ensuring Data Privacy in Accounting.
Step 3: Develop Continuity and Recovery Strategies
This is where you outline how your business will keep functioning during the disruption, and how it will recover afterwards.
Strategies your plan should include:
- Remote work setups that provide secure access to important tools and files from any location
- Cloud environments that support real-time access and reduce reliance on local infrastructure
- Backup and recovery systems including failover options to restore operations quickly
- Alternate site arrangements to ensure internet and system access during outages
- Clearly defined roles for staff responsible for managing continuity and recovery tasks
If you’re planning a shift to cloud, this blog on Cloud Migration Strategies: Steps to a Successful Transition can help shape your approach.
Step 4: Document the Plan
Once your strategies are defined, put everything into a clearly written document. This should be easy to follow and reviewed regularly. It is highly recommended the documentation isn’t overly long, only containing necessary information.
Include in your documentation:
- A summary of priority business functions and their associated risk impact
- Documented recovery strategies outlining steps to restore operations
- Defined roles and responsibilities for continuity and response
- Escalation and communication procedures for managing incidents
- Contact information for key personnel, IT providers and external stakeholders
- Locations and access details for backup systems, recovery tools and workarounds
Storing your BCP securely in the cloud with version control and access permissions means it will be accessible when needed.
Endpoint Management Services can help secure devices and ensure remote access to critical systems, even during a disruption.
Step 5: Train Your Team and Communicate the Plan
Even the best continuity plan will fall apart if no one knows what to do with it. Staff training is often overlooked in business continuity planning. Recent industry reports consistently show that a lack of awareness is one of the main reasons continuity strategies fail during real disruptions.
Steps to take:
- Hold training sessions or workshops with department leads
- Provide checklists and quick-reference guides for key actions
- Clarify team responsibilities for decision-making, communication and recovery tasks
- Ensure all staff know where to find the plan and how to use it
The better your team understands the BCP, the less likely chaos will take over during a crisis.
Step 6: Test and Update the Plan Regularly
Even brief outages lasting less than 30 minutes can significantly impact business operations and revenue streams, depending on the time of day and industry.
Ways to test your BCP:
- Tabletop exercises that walk through disruption scenarios with leadership
- Simulations to practise recovery steps in controlled environments
- Full-scale drills to test end-to-end recovery processes across all departments
Each time you test, identify gaps or outdated assumptions. Then update the plan.
Final Tip: Business continuity planning isn’t something you set once and forget. It needs to evolve with your business, your systems, and the risks around you.
Business Continuity Services and Consulting
Some parts of business continuity planning can be handled in-house. Others benefit from experienced support, especially when systems or recovery timelines are on the line.
For medium businesses, there’s often more at stake than just IT downtime. Client expectations and industry regulations add pressure. This is why professional support is so important.
When to Consider Outside Help
- You’re starting from scratch
If you don’t have a documented plan or don’t know where to begin, engaging an IT consultant saves time and avoids missteps. - Your existing plan is outdated
As systems change, your plan must change with them. If you’ve upgraded platforms or added new sites, your current continuity setup may no longer be fit for purpose. - You need help calculating true costs
An external partner can help you calculate risk in real numbers. IT Support Costs Services can help model what downtime really looks like for your business.
Getting the strategy right matters more than doing it all yourself. If a recent outage or cyber issue caught your team off guard, it’s a clear signal to bring in support and get proactive.
Testing Your Business Continuity Plan
A business continuity plan isn’t useful if no one knows how it works. Testing is what turns a theoretical document into a living process. It shows you whether your team is ready and your procedures make sense under pressure.
Without testing, plans often fall apart the moment they’re needed.
Types of Business Continuity Testing
Tabletop exercises
Run a structured, low-pressure discussion around a specific disruption. Example: “The power goes out for 24 hours at your head office — what happens?”
Simulation testing
Walk through a realistic scenario where systems are unavailable or backups are needed. Make sure teams follow the actual steps outlined in the plan.
Full-scale drills
Coordinate all departments in a full test. This might include working from backup locations, restoring systems from failover environments, or handing off roles.
Each approach gives you new insights into what works, and what doesn’t.
What to Do After Each Test
Find weak points
Look for delays, missed steps, or confusion during the test. These are the areas that need immediate attention.
Check communication flow
Was the right information shared quickly and clearly? If not, review who’s responsible for updates and how they're delivered.
Measure recovery speed
Compare how long it actually took to restore systems and services against your recovery targets. Note any serious gaps.
Update the plan
Refine documentation, fix outdated contact lists, and adjust escalation paths based on what the test revealed.
Even small tests are valuable if they lead to meaningful updates.
And if your business is running a hybrid environment, this guide on Why Hybrid Cloud for Small Businesses is the Best Option gives you further insight.
Be Prepared: Keep Your Business Running in Any Situation
The businesses that stay upright during disruption aren’t panicking. They’ve planned, documented, tested, and they know where the gaps are before they’re exposed.
That’s a good operational strategy.
Steadfast Solutions understands that a business continuity plan gives your team direction when pressure comes. It protects your clients, and it protects your time. And done right, it works quietly in the background until you need it.
If you want practical guidance from a team that understands your systems and your sector, explore our Business Continuity Services.
Contact Us to talk to an expert today.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is business continuity planning, and why is it important?
Business continuity planning is the process of identifying critical business functions and preparing strategies to keep them running during a disruption. Whether it’s a cyberattack, system failure, or natural disaster, having a clear plan in place minimises downtime, protects revenue, and helps your team respond quickly.
What’s the difference between a business continuity plan (BCP) and a disaster recovery plan?
A business continuity plan (BCP) outlines how your business will maintain operations during a disruption. A disaster recovery plan focuses specifically on restoring IT systems, data, and infrastructure. Both are essential, but the BCP covers a broader range of activities, including communication, compliance, and people management.
How often should we test our business continuity plan?
At a minimum, your business continuity plan should be reviewed and tested annually. However, you should also test the plan after major changes, like moving to new systems or onboarding new teams. Regular business continuity tests (such as tabletop exercises and simulations) help you identify gaps and improve response times.
Do we need professional business continuity services?
If you’re not confident in your current plan, or if your business has grown and systems have become more complex, professional business continuity services can help. Working with a consultant or managed service provider ensures your plan is practical, compliant, and tailored to real risks.
