Business continuity managers and IT teams use a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) document to lay out plans for operating enterprises in the face of calamities like severe weather, forced building evacuations, power outages, etc. It identifies operational areas, resources, and recovery plans with assigned individuals that have a significant business effect.

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 it needs to function well despite any 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 in spite of 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 emergency situations 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.

These business continuity plan templates may offer a little more motivation to get going, depending on your requirements. If you're having a problem writing an effective BCP, you can use any of the following templates depending on your business vertical.

12 Business Continuity Plan Templates

We are sharing with you 12 business continuity templates to reduce your time and effort in writing one. Here these are:

1. IT Service Business Continuity Plan Template

This IT Service Business Continuity Plan Template is suitable for IT companies such as software houses and design agencies. It highlights essential steps to undertake and ensure IT processes running in the event of 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 a useful template, 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.

When a crisis happens, the most important asset that any school must safeguard against rapid loss is its critical data. We have seen how educational institutes have been a victim of ransomware attacks wiping out important data from different departments.

In any case, schools must be able to continue operating, regardless of any disruption. Schools may improve their degree of preparation by developing a 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 to certain 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

To maintain productivity and efficiency throughout any unanticipated events or disruptions, use the SaaS (Software as a Business) business continuity plan template.

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 subscriptions to a web or mobile app. Since these businesses sell software as a service, there is a recurring free every month or year.

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 major 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 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 certain 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 to identify all possible risks, design mitigation measures, and allocate duties to important team members. During the business disruption, this template will act as your Hospital Preparedness Program.

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 in place corporate-wide procedures to equip your whole team for a variety of crises. Avoiding liabilities that can occur as a result of an obsolete or insufficient continuity plan is the goal.

7. Construction Company Business Continuity Plan Template

There are additional situations than major disasters that might endanger your business operations.

Your business's essential machinery, tools, and technology might malfunction or get infected with dangerous ransomware. Or, essential employees may quit your business, leaving you rushing to hire extra staff since they lack the specialized abilities needed to finish the project.

These are common scenarios among construction companies. Construction equipment is quite costly and often upwards of millions of dollars. Without a backup disaster recovery plan, construction companies may not be able to complete their clients' work on time.

This template is excellent for architects and construction firms regarding business continuity. It outlines in detail how the construction company will continue its normal business operations in different scenarios:

    • Premises incidents including flood, fire, or storm
    • Infrastructure incidents including power failure, loss of computers, and equipment, and internet outage
    • Staff incidents such as sudden injury or death

8. Bank Business Continuity Plan Template

We live in an interconnected world where the provision of services such as finance and banking are now digital. Other than the developed nations, many emerging economies are now digitizing their financial institutions.

A Business Continuity Plan for financial institutions ensures swift recovery of operations, including services to customers, occurring as a result of natural disasters, power outages, cyberattacks, or human error.

The objectives of a BCP are to minimize financial loss, continue to serve customers, and mitigate disruptions on reputation, operations, liquidity, credit quality, and compliance with federal laws and regulations.

For financial institutions such as banks, a business continuity plan is an essential part of their strategic planning process. Governments around the world regulate financial institutions, and any disruptions can have far-reaching consequences for the company, its customers, and the economy as a whole.

As such, a financial institution's business continuity plan must be comprehensive and well-researched. It should address everything from how the company will maintain customer confidence in the event of a major disruption to how it will keep critical systems up and running. Millions of people rely on mobile apps to transfer funds, pay bills and make online purchases.

9. Business Continuity Plan Template For Manufacturing Industry

Given the importance of manufacturing to the economy, any significant disruption to production can have severe consequences. A business continuity plan is therefore essential. We have already seen how supply chain bottlenecks have hampered growth and increased prices of essential items in most countries around the world.

The plan should outline how the business will continue to operate in the event of an interruption and should cover everything from alternative sources of raw materials to new manufacturing locations. You can use this template to minize the risks of disruptions and ensure that the business can continue to meet customer demand. In today's global market, a business continuity plan is essential for any manufacturing company that wants to stay competitive.

Tech giants and enterprises always have business disaster recovery plans to ensure incidents such as supply chain bottlenecks, equipment failure, injury, or loss of human life have minimum impact on the business.

Critical events pose a threat to financial loss for individuals in the manufacturing sector because of unanticipated downtime, lower plant utilization rates, lost income, and even personnel who are in danger.

For the manufacturing sector, having a business continuity strategy is crucial to both mitigating a catastrophic event as it occurs and maintaining operations for networks dependent on the manufacturer's company.

10. 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.

SaaS and IaaS models are, in many respects, victims of their own 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 components of their business continuity planning and assume their cloud provider would take care of them.

68 percent of businesses outline cloud misconfiguration as their top concern about the security of their infrastructure and data. You need the finest security procedures for dealing with cloud systems since 52 percent of firms ranked disasters.

A business continuity plan is to safeguard your application's uptime in case anything happens to one of the data centers. You can always fall back on running a clone in AWS, for example.

11. Business Continuity Plan Template For Warehouse

Unfortunate occurrences like a global pandemic may result due to planned or unexpected reasons. Any effective Business Continuity Plan must include preparations for such a disaster.

Any crisis may have devastating repercussions on 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 the need to set up and manage multiple warehouses close to customers' locations is vital.

By using this template, you can perform risk assessment, test out emergency situations and come up with viable solutions to ensure your warehouse continues operating as a normal business operation.

Planning entails collaborating with professionals and third parties to provide a suitable answer. To promote a speedy recovery from the crisis, a contingency plan should be well thought out.

With business continuity planning, you gain a thorough understanding of 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 both included in the detection of warehouse contamination. Planning can proceed with the knowledge that an adequate response is already in place.

12. Business Continuity Plan Template for Oil and Gas Companies

For every hour of IT downtime, oil and gas companies lose $1 million. 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 plan will take into account 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 in gaining 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 large upfront investments alongside calculations of oil and gas prices, oil field output, and configuration of refineries. Oil and gas is a high-risk business and 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 major setbacks.

Write a Business Continuity Plan with Your New Template

It is imperative for companies to prepare business continuity plans with well-documented recovery strategies and a complete business impact analysis. There are more benefits than costs in implementing a BCP. The strategy challenges you to consider the potential dangers to your company from new angles. You can then adjust your route as appropriate, improving your prospects of long-term survival.

Analyzing your company's existing situation and level of readiness for unforeseen dangers is the main goal of business continuity plan templates. With it, senior management may locate any areas of the company that need improvement and discover answers to issues that can impede your progress toward your objectives.

With a strong BCP template, minimize the impact of potential disruptions to your business. These templates serve as a guide to developing your own plans, which will vary depending on the type and size of the company.

Leverage any business continuity plan template that fits your requirements and makes your business successful.

Josh is the founder of Technical Writer HQ and Squibler, a writing software. He had his first job in technical writing for a video editing software company in 2014. Since then, he has written several books on software documentation, personal branding, and computer hacking. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.