What is Business Continuity?
Business Continuity is the ability of an organisation to keep critical business processes running during and after a disruption, such as a cyber attack, natural disaster, power failure or system outage.
It covers the planning, preparation and measures that guarantee continuity of operations — even in crisis situations.
🎯 Purpose of Business Continuity Management (BCM)
- Preventing prolonged process outages
- Limiting financial and operational damage
- Protecting people, assets, data and reputation
- Complying with legislation such as NIS2, BIO and ISO 27001
- Being prepared for cyber incidents, Ransomware and OT outages
🧱 Key elements of BCM
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Business Impact Analysis (BIA) | Analyses which processes are critical and how quickly they must be recovered |
| Risk assessment | Insight into threats and vulnerabilities affecting IT and OT systems |
| Continuity plan | Concrete playbooks per scenario (e.g. cyber attack or power outage) |
| Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) | Technical plan for recovering IT or SCADA/PLC systems |
| Crisis communication plan | Agreements on internal and external communication |
| Drills & testing | Regular testing of plans and procedures |
🏭 Relevance in OT/industry
In production environments, Business Continuity is particularly important:
- An outage of SCADA, MES or Historian can halt production immediately
- Failures of PLCs or network connections lead to process risks
- Loss of Sensor or batch data affects quality and Compliance
- Air gap, the zones and conduits model and Defense in Depth are part of the resilience strategy
🧠 Connection with ISMS and NIS2
Business Continuity is an essential element of an ISMS and falls under the obligations of:
- ISO 27001 chapter 17: “Information Security Aspects of Business Continuity Management”
- NIS2: requires recovery plans and incident preparedness
- BIO: contains explicit continuity requirements for government
📌 In summary
Business Continuity ensures that an organisation can respond quickly and in a controlled way to disruptions, so that critical processes continue to function safely and reliably — even during an incident.