Fundamentals
What is Business Continuity Management (BCM)?
Business Continuity Management (BCM) is the discipline of keeping an organisation's critical operations running through disruption — and recovering quickly when something does break.
This guide explains the BCM lifecycle, the terms you'll meet, the standards and regulations that apply, and a pragmatic way to start without a six-month consulting project.
BCM is a lifecycle, not a document
The most common mistake is treating continuity as a binder you write once. BCM is a repeating management cycle: understand the organisation, analyse impact, treat risk, set strategy, write and approve plans, exercise them, and improve after incidents.
The core stages
- Context: map your departments, people, critical processes and the assets and vendors they depend on.
- Business Impact Analysis (BIA): quantify how badly disruption hurts each process over time, and derive recovery objectives (RTO, RPO, MTPD).
- Risk assessment: score threats by likelihood and impact and decide what to treat.
- Strategy & plans: choose recovery strategies and document them as usable plans.
- Exercises: validate plans with tabletops and tests.
- Incidents & improvement: respond, then feed lessons back into the program.
The standards and rules that apply
ISO 22301 is the international standard for a Business Continuity Management System. In the EU, DORA (financial sector, in force since January 2025) and NIS2 (essential and important entities) make tested continuity legally mandatory for many organisations.
Where software helps
Spreadsheets and Word documents drift out of sync the moment they're saved. A BCM platform keeps structured data flowing from BIA to plans to compliance, so recovery objectives, contacts and evidence stay consistent — and produces the audit pack on demand.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery?
- Business continuity is the broad discipline of keeping the whole organisation running (people, processes, facilities, suppliers, systems). Disaster recovery is the IT-focused subset that restores systems and data. DR plans sit inside the overall BCM program.
- What is ISO 22301?
- ISO 22301 is the international standard specifying requirements for a Business Continuity Management System (BCMS). Organisations can be independently certified against it.
- How do I start business continuity management?
- Start small: pick your most critical process, run a business impact analysis to set its recovery objectives, write and approve a plan, and run a tabletop exercise. Then expand scope process by process.
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