9 Best Business Continuity Plan Templates
Business continuity managers and IT teams use a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) document to lay out plans for operating enterprises in the face of severe weather, forced building evacuations, power outages, etc. It identifies operational areas, resources, and recovery plans with assigned individuals with significant business effects.
To make your own, use the free business continuity plan template. You can never be too prepared for a crisis, so provide your business with the resources to function well despite setbacks.
When Should You Use a Business Continuity Plan Template?
Writing a business continuity strategy is critical to ensure your organization remains a going concern despite disruptions. You should have a strategy in place before responding to a calamity. Planning for business continuity is essential for a successful disaster recovery plan when dealing with emergencies such as:
- Floods
- Data breaches
- Storms
- Hurricanes
- Internet or major IT outage due to an earthquake
- Equipment failure
- Injury, death, or sudden exit of key staff
Your organization needs a business continuity plan as much as a business strategy for normal operations.
Depending on your requirements, these business continuity plan templates may offer a little more motivation to get going. If you’re struggling to write an effective BCP, you can use any of the following templates depending on your business vertical.
9 Business Continuity Plan Templates
We are sharing 9 business continuity templates to reduce the time and effort required to write one. Here these are:
1. IT Service Business Continuity Plan Template
This IT Service Business Continuity Plan Template is best for IT companies such as software houses and design agencies. It highlights essential steps to undertake and ensures that IT processes run during a major disruption. Use the template to record all aspects of the continuity plan required for an IT team by identifying recovery objectives, teams, and tactics.
A good IT service business continuity plan template ensures that critical network systems remain operational despite outages. As we live in a digital-first world, businesses cannot survive without an IT service continuity plan template.
2. School Business Continuity Plan Template
With the aid of the school business continuity template, you’ll have a solid backup plan for routine school activities and operations in case of emergency or crisis. You may prioritize responses and operations, identify crucial recovery stages, and create a restoration plan using the BCP template.
Critical data is the most important asset that any school must safeguard against rapid loss when a crisis happens. We have seen how educational institutes have been victims of ransomware attacks, wiping out essential data from different departments.
In any case, schools must be able to continue operating regardless of any disruption. Schools may improve their preparation by developing a sound business continuity plan.
3. Small Business Continuity Plan Template
With the help of this continuity plan for small businesses, you may list your goals for company recovery, select alternative site locations for operations, form recovery teams, and designate recovery duties for specific team members.
The provides a framework and guidance of operations for small businesses to restore their critical functions in the event of unforeseen events. This template includes work processes and lays out clear responsibilities of recovery teams and essential staff members. This is a FEMA-approved business continuity plan template that lists continuity plans to business disruptions due to three primary reasons:
- Fire, a sudden storm, or flooding
- Reduction in workforce
- System failure such as IT or electricity grid
In order for your organization to continue to grow, be sure you can maintain crucial procedures and reduce downtime.
4. SaaS Business Continuity Plan Template
Use the SaaS (Software as a Business) business continuity plan template to maintain productivity and efficiency throughout any unanticipated events or disruptions.
Unlike any other BCP, the SaaS continuity plan focuses more on systems and IT infrastructure than HR and other departments. That’s because SaaS businesses have a cloud-based business model, such as selling web or mobile app subscriptions. Since these businesses sell software as a service, recurring free software is available monthly or yearly.
In the event of a disaster, the critical functions of a SaaS business are equipment and systems. Some prominent SaaS are Google Drive and Dropbox.
The main emphasis is on getting the IT systems back online as soon as possible following a significant disruption that could happen for loss of internet connectivity, floods, fire, or a cyberattack.
5. Healthcare Business Continuity Plan Template
Healthcare businesses like clinics and hospitals cannot afford disruption as it can be life-threatening for staff and patients.
These healthcare templates are great resources to assist healthcare facilities in developing their continuity plans and ensuring an effective and efficient return to normalcy.
With the help of a comprehensive business continuity plan template, you can identify risk strategies for specific business areas like clinical, finance, operations, and IT, specify disaster recovery plans, and rank the most crucial processes for your medical practice.
To sustain productivity and ensure the safety of both patients and employees, healthcare institutions depend on essential processes and procedures. This template will help healthcare providers identify risks, design mitigation measures, and allocate duties to crucial team members. This template will act as your Hospital Preparedness Program during the business disruption.
6. Law Firm Business Continuity Plan Template
A robust business continuity plan for legal firms involves more than data backups. Every law firm has clients with sensitive and confidential data. Ongoing cases and litigation support will not be possible when the law firm ceases to function.
Law firms can put corporate-wide procedures in place to equip your whole team for various crises. The goal is to avoid liabilities that can occur due to an obsolete or insufficient continuity plan.
7. Cloud Computing Business Continuity Plan Template
By switching to cloud-based solutions, your company may become more productive, flexible, and lucrative. Planning is essential before taking this action, especially when considering business continuity in the cloud. This template can help you out.
SaaS and IaaS models are, in many respects, victims of their success since it is far too simple for companies to ignore their offerings. Cloud service companies compete in a very crowded industry. Because of this, suppliers promise to handle every facet of the system and data administration at a minimal cost.
It seems sensible that this might cause companies to overlook important business continuity planning components and assume their cloud provider would take care of them.
Sixty-eight percent of businesses outline cloud misconfiguration as their top concern about their infrastructure and data security. You need the finest security procedures for dealing with cloud systems since 52 percent of firms ranked disasters.
A business continuity plan safeguards your application’s uptime if anything happens to one of the data centers. For example, you can always fall back on running a clone in AWS.
8. Business Continuity Plan Template For Warehouse
Unfortunate occurrences like a global pandemic may result for planned or unexpected reasons. Any effective Business Continuity Plan must include preparations for such a disaster.
Any crisis may devastate businesses with warehouses since they are an essential part of their infrastructure and necessary to provide customer service.
This is true with companies relying on rapid commerce or quick commerce, where setting up and managing multiple warehouses close to customers’ locations is vital.
Using this template, you can perform risk assessments, test out emergencies, and develop viable solutions to ensure your warehouse continues operating as a regular business operation.
Planning entails collaborating with professionals and third parties to provide a suitable answer. A contingency plan should be well thought out to promote a speedy recovery from the crisis.
With business continuity planning, you thoroughly understand the security of your assets, operations, facilities, and personnel. Priority hazards and the assessment of the appropriate course of action in response to recognized risks are included in detecting warehouse contamination. Planning can proceed with knowing that an adequate response is already in place.
9. Business Continuity Plan Template for Oil and Gas Companies
Oil and gas companies lose $1 million for every hour of IT downtime. In the unfortunate event of power failure, it can go as high as $10 million in lost production and possible equipment damage.
A well-crafted business plan template will consider all potential hazards and establish procedures for dealing with them, including evacuation plans, communication protocols, and backup power supplies.
Oil and gas companies attribute their success to insulating themselves from business interruption risk. With ongoing price fluctuation, companies strive to convert effective risk management into business opportunities. This, in turn, helps them gain a competitive edge in the global markets.
The price for not assessing risk is operational downtime. Profitability in the oil and gas field is proportional to significant upfront investments alongside calculations of oil and gas prices, oil field output, and configuration of refineries. Oil and gas is a high-risk business; not having a BCP will lead to severe financial losses.
You can use this template to minimize your losses and ensure your oil and gas company remains a going concern despite significant setbacks.
How to Choose the Right Template
Selecting the right business continuity plan template depends on several factors, including the size of your organization, industry requirements, and specific operational risks. A well-chosen template provides a structured approach to continuity planning while allowing flexibility to address unique business needs.
A simple, easy-to-follow template with essential sections like risk assessment, recovery strategies, and communication plans may be sufficient for small businesses. Larger enterprises or those in regulated industries often require more detailed templates that align with compliance standards and industry-specific guidelines.
Industry matters when choosing a template. Healthcare, finance, and manufacturing companies have different regulatory requirements and operational priorities. A template tailored to your sector ensures you meet compliance obligations while effectively managing potential disruptions.
Customization is another key factor. While generic templates offer a great starting point, they should be adjusted to fit your organization’s structure and critical business functions. Customizing sections such as emergency contacts, IT recovery procedures, and vendor dependencies makes the plan more effective in real-world scenarios.
Consider whether you need a free or premium template. Free templates from government agencies or industry associations provide a solid foundation, but paid templates often include advanced features like automated workflows, compliance checklists, and integration with business continuity software.
Ultimately, the best template is one that helps your organization respond quickly and efficiently to disruptions. It should be clear, actionable, and scalable, ensuring your business remains resilient in any crisis.
FAQs
Here are the most frequently asked questions about business continuity plans.
What is the business continuity planning process?
The business continuity planning process involves identifying potential risks, assessing their impact, and developing strategies to ensure that an organization can continue operations during disruptions. This process includes conducting a business impact analysis to determine the consequences of various threats and implementing measures to protect critical business functions from downtime.
How does a business impact analysis support continuity planning?
A business impact analysis (BIA) is a key step in developing a business continuity plan. It evaluates how disruptions such as natural disasters or cyberattacks affect critical business functions and quantifies the financial and operational impacts. A BIA helps organizations create effective strategies to maintain business operations under adverse conditions by identifying essential services and recovery time objectives.
What is the Business Continuity Planning Suite?
The Business Continuity Planning Suite is a set of tools and templates designed to help organizations develop, test, and implement continuity plans. It provides structured guidance for risk assessment, emergency management, and recovery strategies, ensuring a comprehensive approach to protecting an organization’s essential services.
Why is emergency management important in business continuity planning?
Emergency management is crucial for ensuring a coordinated response to crises that threaten an organization’s ability to maintain business operations. A well-structured plan includes clear communication strategies, resource allocation, and predefined actions to mitigate disruptions, enabling a swift recovery from unforeseen events.
How can businesses ensure their continuity plans remain effective?
To keep an effective business continuity plan, organizations must regularly update and test it as part of their business continuity planning process. Conducting periodic drills, reassessing risks, and refining response strategies help businesses prepare for new challenges and protect critical business functions during unexpected disruptions.
What is a recovery time objective (RTO) in business continuity planning?
An organization’s recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable amount of time that a business process or system can be down before causing significant disruption. It helps organizations set a recovery point objective and determine the necessary resources to achieve a critical business recovery within an acceptable timeframe. Business partners play a key role in determining an organization’s recovery time objective (RTO) by ensuring the availability of essential resources, services, and supply chain continuity.
