Business Continuity is the set of plans and processes that keep an organization’s essential operations running during and after a disruption. It is broader than disaster recovery, which restores IT. Continuity covers the whole business: staff, facilities, communications, suppliers, and the manual workarounds that carry the load while systems are down.
A working program starts with a business impact analysis to find the critical processes, then builds strategies to sustain them, documents the plans, tests them through exercises, and updates them as the organization shifts. The step teams skip most often is realistic testing. A binder that has never been exercised tends to fail the first time real pressure arrives, usually on the contact lists and dependencies nobody kept current. Continuity also leans on people knowing their roles, so cross-training and clear succession plans keep the response from stalling when key staff are unavailable.
Why does business continuity matter for the CISSP exam?
It lives in Domain 1: Security and Risk Management as part of organizational resilience. Know the BIA, recovery strategies, plan components, and the testing types (tabletop, walkthrough, simulation, parallel, and full interruption), plus how continuity connects to disaster recovery without being the same thing.