# What is Business Continuity?

> Business continuity is an organization’s capability and management practice for continuing prioritized products and services at an acceptable level during a disruption and restoring normal operations afterward.

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## Content

It takes an all-hazards view that can include cyber incidents, technology failures, supplier outages, loss of facilities, severe weather, workforce disruption, and other causes.

Planning starts with understanding essential activities and their dependencies on people, premises, information, technology, suppliers, and utilities. A business impact analysis helps establish priorities, acceptable outage and data-loss thresholds, and the resources needed over time. Continuity strategies may use alternate staff or sites, manual workarounds, substitute suppliers, crisis communications, technology recovery, and carefully defined degraded service.

### Key points

- **Set priorities:** Identify critical products, services, and processes; determine the impact of interruption over time; and agree on acceptable minimum service levels.
- **Design strategies:** Address people, facilities, suppliers, communications, records, technology, and decision authority rather than assuming that an IT failover solves the disruption.
- **Prove readiness:** Assign owners, train participants, exercise realistic scenarios and dependencies, capture lessons, and update plans after organizational or environmental change.
- **Important limitation:** A written business continuity plan is not evidence of continuity capability. Untested workarounds, unavailable staff, shared supplier dependencies, or unrealistic recovery assumptions can make a plan unusable.

### Related terms

[Business impact analysis (BIA)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/business-impact-analysis/>) · [Disaster recovery](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/disaster-recovery/>) · [Cyber resilience](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cyber-resilience/>) · [Recovery time objective (RTO)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/recovery-time-objective/>) · [Crisis management](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/crisis-management/>)

### Sources

[ISO 22301:2019 Business Continuity Management Systems](https://www.iso.org/standard/75106.html) · [NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/34/r1/upd1/final) · [Ready.gov emergency and continuity plans](https://www.ready.gov/business/emergency-plans)

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