Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BCP/DRP)

BCP and DRP: Two Complementary Disciplines

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) are often used interchangeably but refer to distinct — if closely related — activities:

• BCP addresses the organisation as a whole: how do critical business functions continue when normal operations are disrupted? It covers people, processes, facilities, suppliers, and communications — not just technology.
• DRP addresses the IT and technology dimension specifically: how are systems, applications, and data restored after a failure? It is a subset of BCP, focused on the technical recovery component.

A mature operational resilience programme requires both: a BCP that defines which business processes are critical and what minimum resource levels they need, supported by a DRP that ensures the technology underpinning those processes can be recovered within acceptable timeframes.

Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is the foundation of any BCP. It answers two questions:

1. Which business functions and processes are critical, and what happens if they are unavailable for different time periods?
2. What are the dependencies (technology, people, suppliers, facilities) that those critical processes rely on?

The BIA produces a prioritised list of business functions ranked by their maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPD) — the point at which the disruption would cause irreversible harm to the organisation.

Key Recovery Parameters

Two metrics defined during the BIA and BCP/DRP design process are critical:

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable time to restore a function or system after a disruption. An e-commerce platform might have an RTO of 2 hours; a back-office reporting system might have an RTO of 48 hours.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. A financial trading system might have an RPO of zero (no data loss tolerated), requiring real-time replication; a document management system might have an RPO of 24 hours.

RTO and RPO are commitments — they must be tested, not just documented. Many organisations discover during their first real-world disaster that their actual recovery times significantly exceed their documented RTO targets.

ISO 22301: Business Continuity Management Systems

ISO 22301 (current version: ISO 22301:2019) is the international standard for Business Continuity Management Systems (BCMS). Like ISO 27001 for information security, it provides a management system framework — not just a technical checklist — for establishing, implementing, operating, monitoring, reviewing, and improving business continuity capability.

Certification to ISO 22301 is sought by organisations in critical sectors (financial services, utilities, healthcare, large logistics operators) and is increasingly requested in enterprise procurement and outsourcing contracts.

ISO 22301 requires:

• BIA and risk assessment
• Documented business continuity strategy and plans
• Exercising and testing (tabletop exercises, simulations, full DR tests)
• Lessons-learned processes following tests and real incidents
• Management review and continual improvement

Regulatory Requirements in Spain and the EU

BCP/DRP requirements are increasingly embedded in EU financial and digital regulation:

NIS2 Directive: Requires in-scope entities (medium-sized companies in energy, transport, health, digital infrastructure, and other critical sectors) to implement “business continuity and crisis management” as one of the mandatory risk management measures. Incident handling, backup management, and disaster recovery are all explicitly referenced.

DORA: For financial sector entities, DORA requires a comprehensive ICT Business Continuity Policy with defined RTO and RPO for critical functions, regular testing (including participation in sector-wide exercises), and explicit backup and restore capability requirements.

ENS (Esquema Nacional de Seguridad): Spain’s public sector cybersecurity framework requires certified BCP/DRP for medium and high-security systems.

Building a BCP/DRP Programme: Practical Steps

For a Spanish mid-sized company building a BCP/DRP programme from scratch:

1. Scope definition — Determine which functions and entities are in scope
2. Business Impact Analysis — Identify critical functions and their dependencies
3. RTO/RPO setting — Agree recovery parameters with business owners and the board
4. Gap analysis — Compare current IT recovery capability to RTO/RPO targets
5. Strategy design — Select recovery strategies (cloud failover, warm standby, manual workarounds, alternative facilities)
6. Plan documentation — Write the BCP and DRP, including call trees, recovery procedures, and communication templates
7. Testing programme — Annual tabletop exercise minimum; technology DR tests at least annually
8. Maintenance — Annual review cycle triggered by business changes, test results, and real incidents

Common Failure Modes

The most common BCP/DRP failures in practice:

• Plans documented but never tested — actual recovery times far exceed RTO
• Plans not updated after IT infrastructure changes (cloud migrations, new systems)
• Backup systems located in the same physical location as primary systems
• BCP focused only on IT recovery, not on people (remote working) or supply chain
• Senior management not engaged — BCP treated as an IT project rather than a business governance matter

How BMC Can Help

We design and implement BCP/DRP frameworks, conduct Business Impact Analyses, define RTO/RPO parameters aligned with business and regulatory requirements, draft continuity and recovery plans, facilitate tabletop exercises, and support ISO 22301 certification preparation.