Business Continuity Planning Built on Tested, Not Assumed, Recovery Capability

Disaster recovery focuses on restoring IT systems and data. Business continuity planning is broader — it addresses how the entire organization continues operating through a disruption, including staff roles, vendor dependencies, and communication procedures, with IT recovery as one component.

At minimum annually, and immediately after any material change to infrastructure, key personnel, or critical vendor relationships. The trigger matters more than the interval: a plan reviewed on a calendar schedule alone is accurate between reviews by coincidence, because the changes that invalidate it — a migration, a departure, a vendor replacement — do not wait for the review date.

A structured walkthrough where recovery-responsible staff talk through their response to a simulated disruption scenario, surfacing gaps in procedures, access, and role clarity without the cost or disruption of a full-scale test.

Backup and recovery address the technical restoration of data and systems. A continuity plan addresses the organizational response around that restoration — who does what, in what order, and how the business keeps functioning in the meantime.

Stale role assignments are exactly what a plan review exists to catch, because nothing in normal operations surfaces them. Recovery role assignments are updated to current personnel, and successors are briefed on their responsibilities before the plan is finalized.

Yes — vendor and platform outages, including Microsoft 365 service disruptions, are addressed through documented alternative operating procedures and vendor escalation paths as part of the plan.

Through tabletop exercises and partial recovery tests conducted against priority systems, producing a tested recovery time benchmark rather than an assumed one based on informal vendor conversations.

A documented inventory of the vendors your critical operations depend on, including support contacts, SLA terms, escalation paths, and alternative operating procedures if that vendor becomes unavailable.

HIPAA and SOC 2 both generally expect documented and tested continuity procedures as part of their broader risk management and availability requirements.

Timeline depends on organizational complexity and the number of critical systems and vendor dependencies in scope, but initial plan development and a first tabletop exercise are typically completed within several weeks.

A single named individual — typically a senior operations or IT leader — should be accountable for keeping the plan current, even if execution responsibilities are distributed across a broader recovery team.