Business continuity planning has traditionally focused on physical disruptions: fires, floods, power outages, and supply chain interruptions. These scenarios remain relevant, but the most likely cause of significant business disruption for most organisations is now a cyber incident. Ransomware attacks that encrypt entire environments, data breaches that trigger regulatory shutdowns, and infrastructure compromises that require complete rebuilds all demand continuity planning tailored to digital threats.
Cyber incidents differ from physical disasters in ways that traditional continuity plans do not address. A flood damages physical assets but leaves data intact on offsite backups. A ransomware attack targets both primary systems and the backups designed to enable recovery. A fire affects a single location while a cyber attack can simultaneously impact every office, data centre, and cloud environment the organisation operates.
Recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives need reassessment through a cyber lens. Restoring from backups after a ransomware attack takes considerably longer than switching to a hot standby after a hardware failure. If your continuity plan promises four-hour recovery but your backup restoration process takes three days, the plan does not match reality for cyber scenarios.
Communication plans for cyber incidents face unique challenges. Normal communication channels may be compromised. If your email server is encrypted by ransomware, how do you coordinate the response team? If your VoIP system runs on affected infrastructure, how do you contact employees and customers? Out-of-band communication channels, established and tested before an incident, prevent this paralysis.
Regular vulnerability scanning services reduce the likelihood of the cyber incidents that trigger continuity plan activation. Identifying and remediating vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them prevents the scenarios that business continuity plans are designed to address. Prevention remains cheaper and less disruptive than recovery.
Expert Commentary
William Fieldhouse | Director of Aardwolf Security Ltd
“Business continuity plans that only account for natural disasters and infrastructure failures are incomplete. A ransomware attack can be more disruptive than a flood, and recovery looks fundamentally different. Organisations need plans that specifically address cyber scenarios, tested through realistic exercises that challenge both technical and business response capabilities.”
Backup strategies for cyber resilience go beyond traditional approaches. Immutable backups that cannot be modified or deleted by ransomware, air-gapped copies stored on disconnected media, and backup systems with separate authentication credentials all protect recovery capability against sophisticated attackers who specifically target backup infrastructure.
Third-party dependencies require inclusion in cyber continuity planning. If a critical cloud provider suffers an outage, or a key software vendor is breached, your organisation must maintain operations despite disruptions outside your control. Identifying single points of failure in your vendor ecosystem and establishing contingency plans for each one strengthens organisational resilience.
Testing cyber continuity plans through tabletop exercises and simulated incidents reveals gaps that document reviews cannot catch. Walk your response team through a realistic ransomware scenario, including the discovery, escalation, decision-making, and recovery phases. These exercises expose assumptions, missing procedures, and resource gaps while there is time to address them.
Regulatory requirements increasingly demand demonstrated cyber resilience. Financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure sectors face specific requirements for cyber incident recovery capabilities. Getting a penetration test quote that includes business continuity validation tests whether your recovery procedures actually work under conditions that mimic real cyber attacks.
Business continuity planning is not a security function or an operations function alone. It requires collaboration across the entire organisation, from technical teams who manage recovery processes to leadership who make decisions about risk acceptance and resource allocation. The organisations that weather cyber incidents successfully are those that planned, resourced, and tested their response before it was needed.