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The 9 Best Business Continuity Plan Templates I Use and Why They Work
Quick summary
A business continuity plan template helps you define who does what, what gets restored first, and how you communicate when operations get disrupted. In this guide, I walk through nine solid templates plus the key components, roles, compliance considerations, and the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery.
I’ve learned the hard way that “we’ll figure it out when it happens” is not a strategy. The first time a real disruption hit one of my teams, the problem wasn’t effort or talent. It was that nobody knew what “done” looked like in the first 30 minutes.
That’s why I like business continuity plan (BCP) templates. A good template doesn’t magically make you prepared, but it does force you to have uncomfortable conversations early: roles, priorities, backups, vendor dependencies, and what you’ll tell customers when things go sideways.
When Should You Use a Business Continuity Plan Template?
If your organization has anything that must keep running, such as payments, customer support, deliveries, clinical workflows, or production lines, you want a BCP in place before the next incident. Templates are useful when you’re moving fast and need a solid structure you can customize.
I typically recommend starting a BCP before you ship a big product change, migrate systems, move offices, or onboard a major vendor. Those are the moments when your “normal operations” assumptions change quietly, and your continuity plan becomes outdated overnight.
Here are common disruption scenarios where a template helps you get moving quickly:
- Cyber incidents (including ransomware)
- Power outages or major internet failures
- Data breaches and credential compromise
- Severe weather, fire, or physical access issues
- Key staff unavailability during critical periods
Difference Between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
I think of business continuity as the whole business keeping its promises during a disruption: people, processes, communications, vendors, and technology. Disaster recovery is narrower and often IT-led: restoring systems, data, and infrastructure to an acceptable state.
In practice, your disaster recovery plan is one major input into your business continuity plan. The BCP answers “How do we keep operating?” while DR answers “How do we restore what broke?”
Why Business Continuity Planning Is Worth It
A continuity plan is less about predicting every scenario and more about reducing decision fatigue when stakes are high. When everyone already knows who decides, what gets restored first, and how you’ll communicate, you recover faster and with fewer surprises.
It also reduces long-term costs. Even if you never have a catastrophic event, the planning process usually reveals single points of failure, unclear ownership, and sloppy vendor assumptions, things that cause slow leaks in day-to-day operations.
1. IT Service Business Continuity Plan Template
If you’re supporting internal systems or client environments, you want a plan that’s heavy on incident triage, service restoration sequencing, and ownership. I like this template because it pushes you to document recovery objectives and operational dependencies instead of just listing contacts.
Use the IT service business continuity plan template when you need to keep networks, ticket queues, and critical tooling functional during outages, not just “bring servers back.”
2. School Business Continuity Plan Template
Schools face a unique continuity challenge: coordinating students, staff, facilities, and sometimes local agencies while protecting sensitive information. This kind of template helps teams map what needs to continue (teaching, meal programs, transportation) and what can pause temporarily.
The school business continuity plan template is a strong starting point if you want a practical checklist-style approach that’s easy to adapt across departments.
3. Small Business Continuity Plan Template
Small teams can’t afford overly complex plans that nobody maintains. The best small-business templates keep things lean: priorities, alternates, vendor contacts, and a simple recovery sequence your team can actually execute.
If you’re early-stage or resource-constrained, use a small business continuity plan template and focus on clarity: who does what, in what order, with what tools.
4. SaaS Business Continuity Plan Template
For SaaS, your continuity plan is inseparable from uptime, incident communications, and operational runbooks. You need clear triggers for incident severity, customer messaging rules, and a recovery sequence that matches your architecture.
The SaaS business continuity plan template works well when you want to document cloud dependencies, monitoring, and the handoff between engineering, support, and comms.
5. Healthcare Business Continuity Plan Template
Healthcare continuity planning isn’t just “protect revenue.” It’s patient safety and operational capacity. A good template helps you identify critical workflows (intake, records access, scheduling, clinical operations) and defines what “minimum viable operations” looks like.
These healthcare continuity planning templates are useful if you want a preparedness-oriented set of resources that supports both clinical and administrative recovery.
6. Law Firm Business Continuity Plan Template
Legal teams live and die by confidentiality, deadlines, and client trust. Your continuity plan needs strong controls on access, encrypted backups, and procedures for handling a key attorney or system when they are unavailable during a time-sensitive matter.
Start with a law firm business continuity plan template if you want a simple structure, then strengthen it with your firm’s security and retention requirements.
7. Cloud Computing Business Continuity Plan Template
Cloud improves resilience, until you realize half your continuity plan is “we assume the vendor handles it.” I like cloud-focused templates because they force you to document shared responsibility, failover expectations, and what you’ll do if a managed service is down.
This cloud business continuity plan template is helpful when your environment includes multiple vendors and you need to capture service-level assumptions and escalation paths.
8. Business Continuity Plan Template for Warehouses
Warehouses have physical constraints that software teams forget: staffing rotations, safety protocols, inventory access, and shipping commitments. A strong template keeps the plan grounded in operational reality: what can you do with limited people, limited access, or reduced throughput?
Use a warehouse-focused business continuity plan template if you want to align recovery planning with real workflows like receiving, picking, packing, and carrier coordination.
9. Business Continuity Plan Template for Oil and Gas Companies
Oil and gas continuity planning often needs tighter sequencing because downtime can be brutally expensive and safety risks are non-negotiable. A good template emphasizes operational hazards, backup power, communications protocols, and recovery governance.
This oil and gas business continuity plan template is a decent starting point when you need to document high-risk operational scenarios and ensure recovery responsibilities are crystal clear.
How to Choose the Right Template
If you only do one thing, pick a template your team will actually maintain. The best continuity plan is the one that stays current and gets tested, not the one that looks impressive in a PDF.
I also recommend matching the template to how your organization runs. If you already manage work through a structured documentation system, align your BCP maintenance with your existing workflow and approvals, this is where something like a document management software workflow makes updates far more realistic.
Key Components Your Template Should Include
Most templates are “fine,” but the weak ones skip the parts that matter during a real incident. Make sure your template captures the essentials without burying people in bureaucracy.
At minimum, I look for these components:
- Activation criteria (who can declare an incident, and when)
- Critical assets and mission-critical services
- Communication channels (internal and external)
- Recovery objectives (RTO/RPO where relevant)
- Recovery sequence (what comes back first, and why)
- Key contacts, alternates, and escalation paths
- Third-party dependencies and service-level assumptions
Roles and Responsibilities
Continuity plans fail when responsibility is vague. Your template should make it obvious who leads, who executes, and who steps in when the primary owner is unavailable.
If you’re building this across teams, it helps to define the “documentation rules” too: who can edit the plan, how changes get approved, and how versions are tracked. I usually align this with document control procedures and document version control so audits and updates don’t become a mess.
Steps to Develop and Implement a Business Continuity Plan
Most teams try to write the entire plan in one sitting, then never touch it again. I prefer a simple loop: draft, validate, test, improve.
Here’s a workflow that consistently works:
- Run a business impact analysis (what breaks, and what it costs)
- Identify critical functions and dependencies (especially vendors)
- Define recovery strategies and the recovery sequence
- Assign roles, alternates, and approval authority
- Write the plan in plain language people can follow under stress
- Test with tabletop exercises, then update based on gaps
Compliance and Regulatory Considerations
If you’re in a regulated industry, your continuity plan isn’t optional paperwork. It’s part of your risk posture. Regulations and standards vary, but your template should leave space for compliance-specific requirements such as customer communications, retention rules, and testing cadence.
Two common reference points I see are ISO-aligned continuity management programs and industry rules that require written BCPs. For example, ISO 22301 is widely used as a framework for a business continuity management system, and financial firms may need BCP procedures that match sector expectations and include documented customer-impact considerations.
Also, don’t forget the controls that get painful during audits: encryption standards, data backups, and vendor documentation (including service-level agreement details). Those are exactly the things that determine whether your plan is defensible when regulators, or customers, ask what you did to prepare.
FAQs
Here I answer the most frequently asked questions about business continuity plans.
What is the business continuity planning process?
It’s the process of identifying operational risks, deciding what must keep running, and documenting how you’ll sustain or restore critical functions during disruption. A strong process includes a business impact analysis, recovery strategies, and regular testing.
What’s the difference between a BCP and a disaster recovery plan?
A BCP covers the whole business response: people, process, communications, vendors, and technology. Disaster recovery typically focuses on restoring IT systems and data, and it usually feeds into the broader BCP.
What should I do if my business is “remote ready”?
Remote readiness helps, but it’s not continuity by default. Your plan still needs clarity on access controls, communication channels, decision authority, and what happens if core SaaS tools (identity, email, chat, ticketing) are unavailable.
How often should we review and update a continuity plan?
Review at least annually, and update whenever your business changes materially: new systems, new vendors, reorganizations, office moves, or major incidents. The best cadence is one your team can stick to, with light quarterly checks and a deeper annual review.
How do we handle third-party risk in a continuity plan?
List your critical vendors, document what you assume they provide, and capture the escalation path when they fail. If your business depends on their uptime, include your fallback options, like alternate providers, manual workflows, or staged degradation.
What’s a common mistake teams make with BCP templates?
They treat the template like a one-time compliance task. The real value comes from maintaining it like living documentation: tested, versioned, and updated as your systems and org structure evolve.
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Josh Fechter
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