This article gives you a complete business continuity plan template for cloud computing, tailored for Singapore and useful across APAC and the US. We will walk through the exact sections, downloads, and examples you need. Read together to the end so you can grab the templates, see how to fill them, and leave with a tested plan you can put into practice today.
Free, editable templates for Cloud Customers and Cloud Providers, aligned to ISO 22301 and ISO 27001, CSA CCM, and NIST SP 800-34, built with Singapore and Southeast Asia in mind.
Pick your path: Cloud Customer | Cloud Provider (MSP or ISV)
Why a Cloud BCP Is Different, Especially in Singapore
If your critical systems live in AWS, Azure, GCP, or SaaS, a traditional BCP is not enough. Cloud continuity hinges on shared responsibility, region selection, identity and DNS resilience, and vendor exit plans. In Singapore, teams also weigh data residency, cross-border latency, and the practicalities of multi Region failover across APAC.
For a quick primer on keeping the network path resilient between users and clouds, our practical guide to connectivity outlines common patterns and pitfalls in country. See our overview of cloud connectivity in Singapore for APAC and US teams.
This article includes two complete templates, one for Cloud Customers that consume SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, and one for Cloud Providers or MSPs that run services for customers. You also get filled Singapore examples, a compliance crosswalk, and a testing kit so you can validate your plan.
What You Will Get and How To Use It
Copy and edit the following assets in DOCX, XLSX, or Google Sheets formats, each with pre filled Singapore examples.
- BCP Policy with scope, objectives, roles, RTO and RPO policy, and a shared responsibility matrix
- Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Worksheet with application inventory, dependencies, and criticality tiers
- Cloud Risk Register for control plane outage, Region failure, IdP lockout, DNS misroute, SaaS vendor exit, and cross border impacts
- Scenario Playbooks as step by step runbooks for the top five cloud incidents
- Crisis Communications Pack for internal, customer, and regulator updates with approvals
- Test and Exercise Kit with tabletop script, evidence log, and after action report form
If you are planning backups or recovery proofs to support auditors, the checklist pairs well with this Singapore centric overview of backup and disaster recovery in the cloud. Read our guide to backup and DR considerations for cloud providers in Singapore.
Choose Your Path, Cloud Customer or Cloud Provider
Cloud Customer template fits organizations consuming SaaS such as Microsoft 365, PaaS databases or analytics, and IaaS virtual machines or containers. It emphasizes third party dependencies, SaaS exit, IdP continuity, and DNS cutover.
Cloud Provider or MSP template fits teams operating multi tenant platforms or managed services. It emphasizes service level objectives, customer communications, incident status pages, and multi tenant blast radius control.
Unsure which architecture you will fail over to. Many Singapore teams operate hybrid patterns with an alternate Region or on premises component. This primer helps frame those trade offs. Explore our guide to hybrid cloud providers in Singapore for US based teams.
Template Section A, BCP Policy for Scope, Roles, Shared Responsibility
Purpose: define the playing field and who does what before an incident hits.
Fill in prompts, excerpt
- Scope and Objectives: which services and data fall under the plan, and what minimum viable service looks like
- Recovery Targets: organization level policy on RTO and RPO by criticality tier, for example Tier 1 less than or equal to 1 hour RTO and less than or equal to 15 minutes RPO
- Roles and Escalation: BC sponsor, incident commander, technical leads, communications lead, handoffs, and time boxed decision points
- Shared Responsibility Matrix: for each dependency, Cloud Provider, MSP, internal app, SaaS, specify responsibilities across identity, network, data backup, logging, disaster recovery drills, status communications, and regulatory notifications
When assigning operational ownership in Singapore time zones, consider escalation workflows and day 2 support models. If you are finalizing who owns what, see this field guide to business IT support in Singapore.
Template Section B, Business Impact Analysis for Cloud Workloads
Purpose: prioritize what to recover, how fast, and why.
How to complete
- Inventory all apps and services with owners, users, and upstream or downstream dependencies such as IdP, DNS, message queues, object storage, databases, and third party APIs
- Classify criticality into Tier 1 safety or revenue critical, Tier 2 high, Tier 3 moderate, Tier 4 low
- Set RTO and RPO with rationale that ties to revenue at risk, regulatory obligations, or customer SLAs
- Map hosting for Singapore workloads, including the primary ap southeast 1 Region and your chosen secondary Region such as Sydney
Example, excerpt, fill in table
- Workload, Payments API
- Primary, AWS ap southeast 1 in multi AZ
- Secondary, ap southeast 2 as pilot light
- RTO and RPO, 1 hour and 15 minutes
- Dependencies, Route 53, ACM, DynamoDB global table, Secrets Manager, and IdP SAML
If location and facility capabilities matter to stakeholders, briefly align expectations using our definitions of Tier 3 data centers and Tier 4 data centers, and when a Tier 2 in Southeast Asia still makes sense for latency and reach. See this note on why US firms often choose Singapore for Tier 2 footprints in Southeast Asia.
Template Section C, Cloud Risk Register with SG and SEA Examples
Purpose: surface cloud specific failure modes with owners and treatments.
Pre filled risks you can adapt
- Regional service disruption such as control plane availability. Mitigate via multi AZ design. Treat via a secondary Region warm standby. Capture evidence via annual failover drills
- Identity provider outage or lockout. Use emergency break glass accounts, cached credentials policy, and alternate sign in
- DNS misconfiguration or misroute. Enforce change control plus health checked failover, signed zones, and a documented rollback
- SaaS vendor exit or major SLA breach. Test data export and maintain an alternate SaaS shortlist. Negotiate contract clauses for export formats and notice windows
- Cross border network degradation. Use traffic steering and acceleration with known good paths. Maintain baseline latency records and alert thresholds
- Key person risk. Name deputies, run runbook walkthroughs, and maintain credential escrow
For hardening steps and governance patterns across the region, see our perspective on cloud security consulting practices in Southeast Asia.
Template Section D, Scenario Playbooks as Copy Ready Runbooks
Purpose: pressure tested steps that any on call engineer or incident lead can execute.
Playbook 1, Region wide outage, example excerpt
- Confirm outage scope against provider status and internal telemetry, open incident, and assign roles
- Freeze writes, snapshot or replicate impacted data if safe to do so, and confirm the RPO gap
- Initiate DNS or traffic failover to the secondary Region and validate health checks
- Promote standby databases and run post promotion smoke tests for auth, payments, and search
- Communicate ETA and workaround and begin customer status updates every 30 minutes
- Capture evidence for audit and begin the after action within 48 hours
Playbook 2, Identity provider disruption or lockout
- Activate break glass authentication, restrict scope to incident responders, and rotate credentials post event
- Enforce least privilege elevation and session recording for emergency actions
Playbook 3, Ransomware in cloud workloads
- Isolate affected VPCs or namespaces, suspend risky pipelines, restore clean AMIs or containers from immutable backups, and audit tokens and keys
Playbook 4, DNS failover or major misroute
- Roll back the last change, validate NS and DS records, re enable health checks, and confirm geo routing intents
Playbook 5, Key person unavailability
- Trigger deputy list, use documented runbooks, and rotate secrets via a sealed process
For deeper design ideas, especially if you mix public cloud and on premises, this guide to hybrid cloud providers in Singapore and our primer on inter cloud interoperability across platforms can help you choose the right failover topology.
Template Section E, Crisis Communications for Internal, Customers, Regulators
Purpose: keep people informed with the right cadence and tone.
What to include
- Communications roles and approvals: who speaks, legal or regulatory reviewers, and time boxed approvals such as 10 minutes for internal and 20 minutes for external
- Templates
- Internal update every 30 to 60 minutes that covers incident state, impact, ETA, and next steps
- Customer update that plainly states business impact, workaround, and next update time
- Regulator friendly version with concise facts, timestamps, initial containment steps, and remediation plan
- Internal update every 30 to 60 minutes that covers incident state, impact, ETA, and next steps
Many teams rely on collaboration suites and mail systems as primary channels for incident communications. Ensure your plan lists the approved tools and emergency contact paths, including power and connectivity contingencies.
Template Section F, Test and Exercise Kit from Tabletop to Evidence to After Action
Purpose: plans become real after testing.
How to run a quarterly tabletop, excerpt
- Scenario brief such as ap southeast 1 network control plane instability during payroll cut off
- Injects every 10 to 15 minutes such as secondary database lagging beyond RPO that forces a decision to extend RTO, scope down, or accept data loss
- Evidence log with who executed each step, the time, and proof such as screen captures and change IDs
- After action report that lists what worked or failed and the specific remediations with owners and due dates
For continuity proofs around backups, runbooks, and recovery evidence, pair your exercises with documented backup jobs and restore tests. As background reading, this overview on backup and DR in Singapore’s cloud ecosystem can help you shape the evidence your auditors expect.
Standards and Compliance Crosswalk for SG Readiness
Use this quick mapping to show how the template covers major frameworks commonly expected in Singapore and across APAC and the US.
- ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management System
- Policy and governance map to the BCP Policy
- BIA and Risk map to the BIA Worksheet and Risk Register
- Exercises map to the Test and Exercise Kit
- Policy and governance map to the BCP Policy
- ISO or IEC 27001 Annex A highlights
- A.5 and A.6 governance map to Policy, roles, and responsibilities
- A.8 asset management maps to the BIA inventory
- A.17 information security aspects of business continuity map to Playbooks, Communications, and Tests
- A.5 and A.6 governance map to Policy, roles, and responsibilities
- CSA Cloud Controls Matrix
- BCR, DCS, IAM map to the Shared Responsibility Matrix, IdP continuity, and backup or restore controls
- BCR, DCS, IAM map to the Shared Responsibility Matrix, IdP continuity, and backup or restore controls
- NIST SP 800 34 Contingency Planning
- Contingency planning policy maps to Policy
- System recovery and reconstitution map to Scenario Playbooks and After action
- Contingency planning policy maps to Policy
When the conversation turns to infrastructure placement and latency economics, this US buyer’s field guide to Singapore Cloud VPS is a handy explainer on speed, cost, and residency trade offs. Read our Singapore cloud VPS guide.
Singapore Ready Architecture Examples for AWS, Azure, and GCP
AWS
Primary ap southeast 1 in multi AZ with secondary ap southeast 2 as pilot light or warm. Traffic via Route 53 latency based routing with health checks. Data with DynamoDB global tables or cross Region read replicas. S3 multi Region replication for critical objects.
Azure
Primary Southeast Asia Singapore with secondary Australia East. Traffic via Azure Front Door or Traffic Manager. Data across paired Regions. Key Vault with soft delete and purge protection. Define policy for privileged break glass accounts.
GCP
Primary Singapore with secondary Sydney. Traffic via Cloud Load Balancing with failover policy. Data replicas such as Cloud SQL cross Region read replica. Guardrails for Artifact and IAM to support rapid rebuild.
If you are calibrating what good enough looks like for lower tier workloads, the data center tier definitions can help contextualize risk and target RTOs. See our primers on Tier 1 and Tier 5 data centers.
Industry Annexes to Tailor the Template
Financial Services
Tighten RTO and RPO. Enforce tested evidence for backups and restore. Maintain audit ready runbooks. For regional context, see our note on cloud banking solutions in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
Public Sector and Regulated
Document data classification, approved Regions, and exit plans. For a high level view of policy drivers, review our summary of the Government Cloud in Singapore.
Healthcare and Sensitive Data
Emphasize identity resilience, encryption, immutable backups, and notification timelines. Consider a conservative staged failover path.
When making platform choices such as PaaS versus IaaS versus SaaS, these explainers clarify shared responsibility and lock in risks. See the advantages of IaaS, the difference between PaaS and IaaS, and how infrastructure as code compares to IaaS. Read the related pieces here, advantages of IaaS, PaaS vs IaaS, IaC vs IaaS. If you are mapping vendors, this landscape of IaaS providers offers a quick orientation.
Operational Ownership, In House or MSP
In house works when you have 24 by 7 coverage, platform depth for DNS, IdP, networking, and databases, and the capacity to rehearse failovers. MSP models work when you need shared on call, platform specialists, and standardized playbooks, provided you retain risk ownership and ensure evidence is captured under your BCMS.
If you are weighing the trade offs, these primers give neutral background without prescribing a choice. Read a walkthrough of managed vs cloud services, what is the difference and which do you need and the top benefits of managed cloud services. For organizations considering partial on premises fallback, this explainer on VMware alternatives provides a current state snapshot.
Conclusion
You now have a Singapore ready business continuity plan template for cloud computing with two audience versions, filled examples, a standards crosswalk, and a testing kit you can adopt immediately. If you want a quick sanity check on your plan or help tailoring the templates to your mix of AWS, Azure, GCP, and SaaS, you can contact Accrets expert for business continuity plan template for cloud computing for a complimentary consult.
When you are ready to implement, Accrets can support outcomes with Enterprise Connectivity including Teridion cross border acceleration, IT Infrastructure and Cloud through cloud infrastructure as a service, enterprise cloud computing, managed IT services, managed backup services, and IT DR as a Service, as well as end to end guidance as a managed cloud service provider and why teams choose Accrets is explained here why Accrets.
Dandy Pradana is an Digital Marketer and tech enthusiast focused on driving digital growth through smart infrastructure and automation. Aligned with Accrets’ mission, he bridges marketing strategy and cloud technology to help businesses scale securely and efficiently.
