Catalog
concept#Reliability#Governance#Architecture#Security

Business Continuity Management (BCM)

BCM is a strategic approach that ensures continuity of critical business processes during disruptions. It combines risk assessment, contingency planning and recovery with governance and testing.

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is an enterprise-level framework to ensure critical business functions continue during and after disruptions.
Established
Medium

Classification

  • Medium
  • Organizational
  • Organizational
  • Intermediate

Technical context

IT service management (e.g. ServiceNow)Monitoring and observability toolsIncident response and communication platforms

Principles & goals

Prioritize by critical business functionsContinuous review and testingClear responsibilities and escalation paths
Run
Enterprise, Domain

Use cases & scenarios

Compromises

  • Insufficient testing creates false confidence
  • Lack of supplier coordination increases outage risk
  • Governance gaps cause slow decision-making
  • Regular, realistic tests and tabletop exercises
  • Cross-functional involvement and clear responsibilities
  • Versioning of plans and documented lessons learned

I/O & resources

  • Inventory of critical business processes and assets
  • Risk and business impact analyses (BIA)
  • Contingency and recovery plans
  • Activatable business continuity plans
  • Escalation and communication protocols
  • Test reports and improvement roadmap

Description

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is an enterprise-level framework to ensure critical business functions continue during and after disruptions. It covers risk assessment, incident response, recovery strategies, testing and governance. BCM reduces downtime, preserves revenue and reputation, and embeds stakeholder communication and continuous improvement into operations.

✔

  • Reduced downtime and faster recovery
  • Preservation of revenue and reputation
  • Improved alignment between IT, operations and management

✖

  • Requires ongoing maintenance and resources
  • Cannot prevent all disruptions completely
  • Dependency on data quality and inventory accuracy

  • Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)

    Time to restore critical functions after an incident.

  • Success rate of contingency tests

    Share of tests that meet planned recovery objectives.

  • Number of identified critical dependencies

    Volume of documented internal and external dependencies.

Bank: emergency IT and continuity organization

Large bank operates multiple redundant data centers, regular DR tests and centrally governed BCM.

Manufacturing: supply chain resilience program

Manufacturer implemented multi-sourcing, buffer stocks and playbooks for supplier outages.

Public sector: disaster recovery coordination

Agency coordinates contingency plans with municipalities, runs citizen information channels and regular exercises.

1

Conduct inventory of critical processes and assets.

2

Perform business impact analysis (BIA) and risk assessment.

3

Implement contingency plans, recovery runbooks and test cycles.

⚠️ Technical debt & bottlenecks

  • Outdated infrastructure without redundancy
  • Missing automation for recovery steps
  • Incomplete documentation of interfaces
Single point of failure in IT systemsStaffing shortages for emergency teamsIncomplete inventory of critical assets
  • Only IT-specific measures without business process perspective
  • Documentation exists but is outdated and unusable
  • Overestimating in-house recovery capabilities
  • Too infrequent tests lead to surprises during real incidents
  • Unclear escalation paths delay decisions
  • Focusing only on technical aspects, not business processes
Risk analysis and business impact assessmentContingency planning and operations continuityGovernance, compliance and stakeholder management
Criticality of business processesAvailability requirements and SLAsDependencies on suppliers and partners
  • • Budget and resource limits
  • • Regulatory requirements and compliance
  • • Technical dependencies of external partners