Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
A business continuity plan, or BCP, documents how an organization continues to operate during and after a disruption — covering people, processes, facilities, and technology. It answers what the business does when normal operations are unavailable, not merely how data gets restored.
What a Business Continuity Plan Covers
A workable plan identifies the functions the business cannot pause, the maximum tolerable downtime for each, and who is responsible for what during an event. It names alternate ways of working, defines communication procedures for staff and clients, and specifies the recovery objectives that technology has to meet. Crucially, it is exercised periodically, because an untested plan is an assumption.
BCP Versus Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery is the technology component — restoring systems and data to defined recovery time and recovery point objectives. Business continuity is the wider discipline that includes it, addressing how people keep serving clients while systems are being restored. A firm can have excellent disaster recovery and still stop functioning because nobody knew what to do.
Why a BCP Matters for Investment & Professional Firms
Regulators and clients increasingly expect a documented, tested continuity plan, and SEC-registered advisers face explicit expectations around operational resilience and incident response. DKBinnovative aligns continuity planning with tested recovery objectives so the plan reflects what the technology can actually deliver.