Best Practices for Business Continuity

In 2025, global business risks continue to grow across geopolitical, environmental, and technological domains. We have already witnessed major armed conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, growing economic tensions and trade wars, natural disasters, and cases of societal polarization that led to civil unrest. Along with cyber threats and misinformation spread by GenAI, these are ranked as the most severe global risks, according to a recent report from the World Economic Forum.

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The ever-growing risks can result in operational downtime, supply chain disruptions, significant financial losses, undermined customer trust, irreversible reputational damage, and regulatory fines. To avoid such devastating consequences, it’s essential to build long-term resilience by developing an efficient business continuity plan.

What Is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a document that outlines a set of actions and processes on how a company needs to operate during and after unexpected disruptive events. It also specifies disaster recovery plans required to run business operations, such as restoring critical IT infrastructure, networks, and applications. The purpose of BCP is to rapidly get your business back on track while minimizing downtime and data losses.

Amidst the current volatile and high-risk business climate, implementing a business continuity plan is crucial for maintaining operational resilience and proactively safeguarding your company from various threats.

Importance of Business Continuity Planning

Digitally transformed companies now operate complex hybrid IT landscapes that combine public and private clouds, as well as on-premises infrastructure. Such setups significantly diversify the risks, as they are vulnerable not only to cyberattacks but also to software defects and human errors, meaning that even a small failure can lead to ripple effects over the entire business.

For example, Cloudflare, a global network services provider, faced a major outage in September 2024, which affected its servers across Europe and the US. As a result, the daily operations of thousands of companies were disrupted as they could not access essential working tools, such as Zoom and HubSpot.

Furthermore, on October 19, 2025, AWS suffered from an hours-long outage that disrupted the work of 2,000+ companies, including Signal, Snapchat, Slack, Zoom, Netflix, and affected millions of users across the globe. In its postmortem assessment, AWS revealed the cause of the outage – a software defect within its database (DynamoDB) automated domain name system (DNS) management. The defect could not be repaired automatically and required manual intervention from AWS experts.

These cases illustrate how heavily modern life depends on IT infrastructure and that even global tech giants are not entirely immune to business disruptions.

To secure your company from downtime and disruptions, Tieotevry Create recommends implementing a business continuity system according to the following best practices.

1. Determine Threat Scenarios and Critical Activities

Before creating a business continuity plan, one must identify a range of potential threat scenarios, internal and external risks. Certain types of threats may be more prevalent in certain locations than others. For example, a company can be located in an area with a higher threat of earthquakes, while power outages are more likely to occur in areas with less robust electricity supplies.

It is also crucial to identify core activities and services in the organization that must be continued during and after a significant disruption and must be aligned with stakeholders and clients. By identifying the most important, it becomes simpler to prioritize the activities for continuous delivery, estimate the recovery time, and consider issues.

2. Develop a Detailed Business Continuity Plan

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a master checklist, outlining the following:

• Complete hardware and software inventory
• Required data backups and backup site locations
• Main disaster recovery solutions and sites
• A designated alternative site for operations
• Contact information of emergency respondents
• Notification matrix, suggesting who should be informed
• Communication plan for employees, clients, and other affected stakeholders
• Blueprint for the recovery plans

The goal of BCP is to provide exhaustive information regarding the backup sites and disaster recovery services, specify the responsibilities and recovery efforts, and how different teams should respond. Plans should also include step-by-step actions for ensuring operations during short-term and long-term disruptions.

3. Implement 24/7 Infrastructure Monitoring and Support

Infrastructure monitoring tools help assess and diagnose the performance of all your technical assets – on-premises and cloud systems, networks and servers, virtualized environments, and any other portfolio items. By knowing how your systems operate, you can catch the early signs of potential disruptions due to network saturation, malware, unplanned downtime, or external intrusion.

Considering that most enterprises have significant technical portfolios, with infrastructure residing in on-premises data centers, IaaS, and PaaS cloud platforms, along with edge devices, infrastructure monitoring software can also ensure complete visibility into all assets and subsequently enable the faster discovery of incidents.

The best infrastructure monitoring tools provide real-time insights regarding performance degradation and can be configured to:

• Run 24/7 automated monitoring of networks, servers, applications, and databases, regardless of their location.
• Perform proactive performance assessment and provide recommendations for improvements.
• Provide a detailed classification of incidents and steps for resolution.

In addition, you can reduce the operational costs of monitoring by selecting an automated monitoring solution and having an eternal L2/L3 support team on the frontline. That’s exactly what our client did to improve their customer service levels – learn more about this project in our case study.

4. Create a Disaster Recovery Strategy

A disaster recovery plan is the cornerstone of BCPs. However, the two terms often get confused. Thus, to clarify: what is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) is an annexed plan, specifying the main strategies, policies, and procedures for managing IT disruptions and returning to full operations after unplanned interruption.

In this sense, when comparing disaster recovery vs business continuity, you should note that:

• Business continuity planning spans multiple operational processes and departments. It’s a master plan for mitigating disruptions and regaining control.
• Disaster recovery is a key part of BCP. However, the operational focus here stays on IT systems, as well as data recovery.

A standalone DR plan includes the following documented elements:

• A complete list of hardware and software assets, ranked by criticality;
• Baseline recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) for each set of applications;
• Key personnel responsible for executing the disaster recovery plan;
• A list of disaster recovery sites and disaster recovery software;
• Extra instructions for customers and employees.

Your DR strategy should be designed around your recovery goals, based on the RTO and RPO values for different types of assets.

For example, critical customer-facing solutions will require a hot disaster recovery site – one offering that can accommodate a full copy of your production site, including instant data backups. In such cases, businesses opt for cloud-based disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions that provide RTO in minutes and RPO in seconds.

Less critical systems (i.e., those that can tolerate longer recovery) can be placed in warm sites. These act as remote backups of your production site; however, they require extra time and effort to establish hardware and network connections.

Lastly, your DR plan should also specify cold sites – remote, yet more affordable locations that require extra configurations to become fully operational. Cold DR sites are the optimal choice for backing up non-critical data (e.g., information that you store due to compliance requirements).

Apart from ranking applications (and data) by recovery priority, your DR strategy should further specify the end-to-end recovery process that includes data backups, archiving, restore procedures, and cleanup.

In addition, ask your internal DR team or external consultants to:

• Select, configure, and implement a continuous deployment (CD) toolkit to achieve a smooth recovery.
• Verify that DR sites have the same security and compliance configurations as production sites.
• Check the overall security of your DR process, along with access management policies.

5. Raise Employee Security Awareness

Even the best-in-class business continuity solutions will fall short if business users fail to follow the basic IT security best practices.

The global cost of cybercrime, such as data breaches and ransomware attacks, has reached $10.2 trillion in 2025, and may reach $16 trillion by 2029, according to this research.

Disaster recovery and business continuity plans can help deal with the aftermath of an attack or data breach. However, they’ll eventually have no impact if your teams do not understand:

• How their daily actions contribute to operational disruptions.
• How to report suspicious activities and escalate an issue.
• What their roles and responsibilities are in the BCP process.
• Make to help them develop adequate cybersecurity habits.

6. Conduct Disaster Simulation Tests

Having a BCP and a DR plan is just one part of the equation. To effectively act upon them, you need to know how to test a business continuity plan. If you have recently implemented a new plan or adopted new business continuity software, organize a stress test for it.

In order to do that, create an environment that simulates an actual disaster (e.g., data center power outage). Assess how all involved infrastructure and personnel will respond. If you wonder how often an organization should test its BCP, a recommended practice is once per year at least.

To monitor the effectiveness of your plan, set forth several business continuity metrics:

• Target RPO (recovery point objectives)/RTO (recovery time objectives)
• Target SLA (service level agreement) levels
• Mean time to recover a business process
• Difference between target and actual recovery time

Observe your team's responses and document where they struggle. Finally, analyze the findings to determine knowledge and processual gaps in your plans.

How to Ensure Business Continuity

To ensure business continuity, you need to make sure your BCP is feasible, practical, and up to date. In addition, a business continuity plan must be supported by the top management and then by all the company’s employees, who should be highly aware of the plan, its steps, and the role they play. It is the responsibility of senior management to create and update the plan; workers cannot be tasked with such responsibility. It is also likely that the plan will remain feasible and up to date if management devotes enough time to its testing.

Conclusion

While a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy cannot fully protect you against all unprecedented events, it can drastically reduce the recovery time, help mitigate rising cybersecurity risks, increase overall technical resilience, and keep the company up and running while recovering from a disaster.

At Tietoevry Create, we offer top-tier BC/DR and cybersecurity services to help safeguard your business from the ever-evolving threats. Contact us to reinforce your security posture and proactively respond to even the most adverse risks.