How to Write, Test, and Maintain a Business Continuity Plan

Name: How to Write, Test, and Maintain a Business Continuity Plan
Rating: 4.6 (1302 reviews)

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning - Are you prepared?

Created byDiondria Holliman

Last updated 2/2022

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What you'll learn

Learn how to write, test, and maintain an effective business continuity plan which accounts for the critical recovery times to keep your business running.
Be a part of the solution in your organization to contribute to the development of business continuity plans.
Understand how to protect your company from the obligation of paying millions in response to ransomware attacks.
Better prepare for disruptive events in order to respond to incidents or crises in a calm and forward-thinking manner as it pertains to information systems.

Course content

5 sections • 27 lectures • 1h 56m total length

Welcome & Course Overview3:02
Write, test, and maintain a robust business continuity plan that protects critical data and applications, supports incident response, and aligns with disaster recovery in a post-pandemic risk landscape.
Key Terms & Why it Matters2:34
Define key terms such as business continuity, BCP, disaster recovery, and BCDR, and explain why continuity protects operations, customer confidence, and shareholder value.
Why Now? Cybersecurity & How it's Linked6:46
Explore how the COVID-19 pandemic spurred new cyber threats, the shift to cloud and work from home, and how business continuity and cybersecurity preserve availability, integrity, and confidentiality.
Standards & Guidelines (NIST/ISO)4:36
Explore international and national standards for business continuity. Use ISO 22301 with ISO 27001 to build a compliant, secure plan through plan-do-check-act.
Reflection & Review1:31
Reflect on what you've learned about adjusting to the current risk environment and the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery. Embrace cybersecurity and standards and guidelines to protect assets.

Anatomy of BCDR1:03
Identify the scope of the BCDR plan and map critical functions and dependencies. Explain the relationship between business continuity and disaster recovery and establish acceptable downtime.
Program Management Step 1 - Project Initiation7:12
Learn the six-step business continuity and disaster recovery process, starting with project initiation to define scope, schedule, and budget, obtain executive buy-in, then develop policy and charter.
Program Management Step 2 - Business Impact Assessment (BIA)5:21
Identify critical business functions and resources through business impact analysis, assessing above the surface and below the surface costs of disruption from cyber attacks, and establish recovery priorities and times.
Program Management Step 2 - (BIA) - Risk Management6:26
Identify threats and opportunities, prioritize risk, respond by avoiding, reducing, or promoting opportunities, and assess residual risk within a BIA framework.
Program Management Step 3 - Recovery Strategy6:13
Define the recovery strategy by prioritizing BIA outcomes and setting RPO, RTO, MTD, and WRT, while evaluating backups and cold, warm, and hot site options.
Common Pitfalls & Wrap Up3:27
Identify pitfalls in business continuity planning, from executive support gaps and weak IT partnership to GDPR or HIPAA noncompliance, and emphasize recovery strategies and BIA for continuous improvement.

Disaster Recovery (DR)3:54
Learn how disaster recovery supports business continuity by detailing DRP essentials, RTO and RPO targets, and collaboration between IT and the business.
BCDR Process1:51
Explore the two-phase BCDR process, covering pre-disaster mitigation and preparedness with BIA-derived risks, plus post-disaster response and recovery actions, including RTO and RPO considerations.
Pre-Disaster Efforts: Mitigation6:37
Learn to mitigate pre-disaster risks by leveraging BIA-driven recovery priorities, strong third-party contracts with NDAs and SLAs, cloud considerations, ongoing monitoring, and layered security controls—physical, technical, and administrative.
Pre-Disaster Efforts: Preparedness7:13
Promote organizational readiness through preparedness, defining roles from executive sponsor to BCP coordinator and IT services, and exploring testing types and audits aligned with ISO 22301.
Post-Disaster Efforts: Response5:11
activate post-disaster response by protecting life, containing damage, and stabilizing operations through a disaster recovery timeline and escalation to guide leadership, IT, and communications toward short-term recovery.
Post-Disaster Efforts: Recovery4:04
Recover from disasters by detailing reconstruction, returning to normal operations, and conducting a lessons-learned session to improve RTO, RPO, and recovery time achievable (RTA).
Core Concepts1:54
Review disaster recovery planning from pre disaster to post disaster, outlining mitigation, security controls, defense strategy, monitoring, preparedness training, and NDA/SLA governance for ongoing operations and recovery.
Common Pitfalls & Wrap Up2:27
Identify common pitfalls in disaster recovery planning, involve IT and business teams, test plans, and apply lessons from past disruptions to strengthen your risk-aware, defense-in-depth business continuity plan.

Case Study Synopsis3:02
BCP Template – Introduction (Part 1)4:51
Download and fill a blank BCP template to build a Sugarland Bakery case study, outlining the purpose, scope, objectives, assumptions, policies, and governance.
BCP Template – Business Impact Analysis (Part 2)5:25
Gather data from finance and accounting to map losses, vital records, and critical systems; assess hurricane and cyber attack scenarios; set RTO and RPO; outline resource requirements.
BCP Template – Contact List (Part 3)2:02
Maintain five contact lists for disaster response—command centers and recovery team details, emergency contacts, external partners, and insurance—ensuring up-to-date names, numbers, emails, and roles with monthly reviews.
BCP Template – Recovery Strategies (Part 4)7:34
Explore recovery strategies for activating and deactivating a business continuity plan, detailing hurricane and cyber attack responses, activation criteria, site preparation, data backups, and post-event recovery.
BCP Template – Recovery Capabilities (Part 5)3:15
Explore how to train, test, and maintain a business continuity plan, including awareness programs, drills, change control, and secure distribution of plans across employees, executives, and recovery teams.

Creating Conducive Culture (CCC)5:58
Foster a culture of resilience through leadership commitment, empowering employees to adapt and test the business continuity plan, identify critical systems and RPO/RTO, and drive digital transformation and cloud-enabled resilience.
Course Review & Reflection2:40
Apply course concepts to real-world scenarios by developing your business continuity plan with provided tools, integrating units, detailing disaster steps, testing, and pandemic lessons to build a resilient culture.
Course Quiz

Requirements

No experience needed. You will learn everything you need to know.
While there are no prerequisites for this course, students will benefit from having familiarity with their business' current organizational structure and a sense of what continuity plans are already in place (if any).
Course glossary and template files are attached, you can download them ahead of time for an uninterrupted learning experience.

Description

Are your business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) plans up-to-date to meet today’s challenges? Clearly, at the onset of the pandemic, nobody planned on sending their entire workforce home, in fact some organizations made declarations in the not-so-distant past to NEVER allow work from home. The lesson learned here is to never say never because NEVER will show up. It also means the capabilities existed all along, but they were forced to find a way to make it happen quickly.

I created this practical Udemy course for you to understand how to be proactive so that your organization can continue to operate through a variety of threats — be it a health crisis, a natural disaster, or possibly a ransomware attack. Starting from the basics of what these plans are, then moving on to reviewing a real-world case study, and ultimately, creating your own plan, this a valuable, hands-on training course that will benefit you and your organization for many years to come. Best of all, zero previous business continuity experience is required.

My course is intended to demystify even the most seemingly complicated components of building a tangible business continuity plan without any hidden sales pitches to purchase a technology toolset. Furthermore, I added a bonus completed template based on a case study to break down the concepts and yet keep it simple enough to navigate through a real-life disaster.

This course is a perfect start to revise or develop a strong business continuity plan based on the changing priorities post the pandemic. Even if you have plans in place, it’s time to rewrite your playbook to fit our current risk environment.

Specifically, this course will include the following key elements in writing an effective plan:

Consolidating the location of critical assets
Identifying contacts who need to be notified
Providing up-to-date procedures to assist in recovery
Outlining alternative resources to continue operations
Testing to ensure plans work
Fostering a culture of resilience

It’s not hard to be ready. In fact, the only thing harder than planning for a disaster is explaining why you did not.

So, if you’re ready, enroll today and let’s get started on that journey together!

(Not to mention: this is going to be an incredibly awesome experience to complete an interesting case study together. I'll see you in the course!)

Who this course is for:

Business Continuity Planning training is ideal for professionals seeking to better prepare for disruptive events -- whether it’s severe weather or a cyberattack – which is critical to the survival of any business.
Business Continuity Management is a mission-critical function for leadership seeking to lay a strong foundation for creating organizational resilience and to protect value returned to employees, customers, investors, and shareholders alike.
Students will receive a Certificate of Completion upon completing all elements of the course.

How to Write, Test, and Maintain a Business Continuity Plan

What you'll learn

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Course content

Introduction5 lectures • 18min

Business Continuity Planning6 lectures • 30min

Disaster Recovery Planning8 lectures • 33min

Real World Application6 lectures • 26min

Conclusion2 lectures • 9min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: