How to Build a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) to Enable Cyber Incident Management

In the first part of our series, we explored how to structure an effective cyber incident management team. The next step is ensuring that your Business Continuity Plan (BCP) truly supports that team when things go wrong.

The BCP serves as the overarching governance document that outlines the business priorities, dependencies, and decision structures to enable business missions and be followed when major disruptions occur.

A well-written BCP is not just about natural disasters or data center failures; it is the operational backbone that keeps your business functional during any crisis, including those rooted in cyber incidents.

Too often, however, BCPs are written once, approved, and forgotten. A living BCP, by contrast, defines how your organization maintains its critical functions when technology or data is compromised. It gives the incident management team permission and structure to act decisively rather than improvising under pressure.

Because our focus is cyber resilience, we will insist here on the BCP components that matter most for supporting cyber incident management. While we are not business continuity or corporate resilience consultants in the traditional sense, years spent orchestrating real cyber incidents have given us a deep appreciation for how continuity planning and incident management intersect. That experience allows us to highlight the areas where standard BCPs can be strengthened with practical considerations critical during a cyber crisis.

Keep in mind that a BCP is never one-size-fits-all: its format and level of detail vary depending on the organization and its sector. A bank, a hospital, and a defense contractor will all share similar objectives but express them through very different governance structures.

When supporting clients in developing or modernizing their cyber incident management programs, these are the BCP elements we make sure to establish first, all of which map back to recognized frameworks such as ISO 22301 (Business Continuity Management Systems) and NIST SP 800-34 Rev.1 (Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems).

01 Identify and Prioritize What Must Stay Alive

Every continuity effort begins with clarity on what the organization cannot afford to lose.

Conducting a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) helps determine the essential business functions and define measurable objectives for recovery (RTO/RPO) and qualification of data loss scenarios.

Beyond the technical numbers, the exercise reveals what truly sustains the enterprise, including :

• Revenue streams

• Contractual obligations

• Customer trust

• Legal compliance

Each critical function must be mapped to the systems, data, and people it depends on. This mapping becomes the incident commander’s compass when prioritizing restoration.

Without such clarity, even the best responders risk spending time and resources reviving the wrong systems first, while the business continues to bleed elsewhere.

02 Integrate Cyber Scenarios Into Your Continuity Planning

A BCP that ignores cyber threats leaves a dangerous blind spot. Many plans still focus exclusively on physical disruptions like floods or power outages, yet the most frequent and damaging crises today originate in digital space.

Modern continuity planning must explicitly consider ransomware, data corruption, cloud service failures, and supplier compromises. For each scenario, determine how core activities such as order processing, payments, or customer communication would continue if IT systems were suddenly unavailable. Establish temporary manual procedures and define how teams will operate offline if necessary.

The goal is not to predict every possible attack but to ensure the organization can sustain its essential business even when its digital backbone falters.

03 Clarify Roles and Interfaces With the Incident Management Team

Many organizations maintain both a BCP Coordinator role and a Cyber Incident Commander, and their responsibilities often overlap in moments of crisis. To avoid confusion, governance should make their boundaries explicit.

• The Incident Commander is accountable for managing the cause and impact of the cyber event itself : investigation, containment, and resolution.

• The BCP Coordinator, meanwhile, focuses on keeping the organization operational despite the disruption.

If an incident escalates into a full continuity event, the Incident Commander should technically report to the BCP Coordinator or crisis management team, ensuring business survival decisions remain aligned with corporate priorities.

Clear role definition and reporting relationships prevent duplication, authority conflicts, and hesitation at the worst possible time.

04 Document the Critical Resources and Dependencies

Continuity depends on knowing who and what you rely on. Your BCP should maintain an updated inventory of critical suppliers, cloud providers, and key clients, including reliable contact details and escalation procedures.

Offline copies of essential procedures, credentials, and emergency contacts should exist in secure, controlled formats so the team can act even if digital systems are unavailable. The plan should identify which business systems are most critical to restore first (e.g. operational technologies or machines, financial systems, customer portals, communication channels, etc) while referring to the Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) for the technical specifics of restoration.

Finally, include alternate communication methods such as secure chat, SMS cascades, or satellite phones to ensure coordination remains possible if your main platforms go dark.

05 Ensure Leadership Support and Decision Authority

In a cyber crisis, time and confidence are everything. Executives may be called upon to make high-stakes decisions: shutting down operations, activating insurance coverage, or authorizing public statements. The BCP must clearly state who holds that authority and under what conditions it can be exercised.

Define the triggers for declaring a continuity event and outline the escalation path toward the crisis management team. Decision paralysis is often more damaging than the incident itself. Pre-defined governance removes hesitation, ensuring that leadership can act quickly, coherently, and in alignment with risk appetite.

06 Practice and Maintain

No plan survives untested. Regular exercises are the only way to ensure the BCP works when it truly matters.

Combine tabletop simulations with live-fire cyber scenarios to test not only technical recovery but also decision flow, communication, and leadership coordination under pressure.

After each exercise or real event, conduct structured lessons-learned reviews and update the plan accordingly. Treat the BCP as a living document. It evolves with your organization and matures as you do.

Later in this series, we will explore how orchestration platforms can streamline these exercises, simplify documentation, and generate meaningful reports on team performance and lessons learned.

Tying it all together

A solid Business Continuity Plan is not a binder on a shelf; it is a living instrument of resilience. It gives your cyber incident management team a clear compass, showing what must be preserved, in what order, and with what trade-offs.

When combined with empowered leadership and structured orchestration, the BCP transforms chaos into coordinated continuity.

In our next article, we will move to the Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) (the "technical twin" of the BCP) and explore how to rebuild systems efficiently while preserving compliance, evidence, and trust.

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More reading? Continue with our practical article "How to build a DRP aligned with incident management" to put in place for optimal incident management.

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