Business continuity planning and disaster recovery work best as one integrated system: BCP keeps critical business services running during disruption (people, process, communications, workarounds), while DR restores the technology and data needed to meet agreed recovery targets (RTO/RPO).
In practice, you start with a Business Impact Analysis (BIA), set recovery objectives, map real-world dependencies, build continuity and recovery runbooks, and then test on a schedule so you can prove it works. Read on and we’ll build this together step by step with copy/paste templates you can use immediately.
TL;DR
- BCP is the business operating plan during disruption; DR is the technical recovery plan to restore systems and data.
- Start with a BIA, then set RTO/RPO targets, then map dependencies beyond IT (identity, telecom, SaaS, vendors).
- Build BCP roles and communications plus DR runbooks and restore/failover methods.
- Test using a maturity ladder (tabletop to full-scale), capture evidence, and improve continuously.
What you’ll get from this guide (and who it’s for)
This is written for global readers with two primary audiences in mind.
If you’re an SMB, you’ll get a minimum viable approach that prioritizes outcomes over paperwork, with lightweight templates you can complete in a workshop.
If you’re enterprise IT, you’ll get governance-ready building blocks: portfolio tiering, dependency mapping, testing evidence, and vendor accountability, without drifting into theory.
If you want quick refreshers on terminology, you can skim fundamentals of cloud computing or clarify the difference between cloud computing and cloud storage so your recovery scope and ownership are unambiguous. And because resilience often supports broader modernization, it helps to see how continuity fits into transformation programs, especially in a region like Singapore where digital resilience is taken seriously as part of broader initiatives such as Singapore’s government digital transformation.
Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery (and where Incident Response fits)
Let’s define this in a way that prevents confusion later.
Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is how the business keeps delivering critical services during disruption: people, process, communications, and manual workarounds.
Disaster Recovery (DR) is how you restore technology services: systems, data, infrastructure, and integrations, to meet business recovery objectives.
Incident Response (IR) is how you detect, contain, investigate, and recover from security incidents, often overlapping with DR during ransomware or destructive attacks.
A quick owner and output view helps.
- BCP owner: business leadership and operations with IT support. Outputs: continuity procedures, comms plans, staffing coverage, workaround playbooks.
- DR owner: IT (infrastructure, apps, data, security). Outputs: runbooks, recovery order, restore or failover method, validation checks.
- IR owner: security. Outputs: containment actions, evidence handling, eradication steps, recovery coordination.
BCP answers: How do we keep serving customers?
DR answers: How do we bring systems back safely and correctly?
Step 1: Run a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) that’s actually usable
A Business Impact Analysis should not be a long report that no one updates. A good BIA is a decision tool: it tells you what must be restored first and why.
Copy/paste BIA worksheet
- Process or Service
- Business owner
- Customers affected
- Impact if unavailable (Revenue, legal or regulatory, safety, reputation, operations)
- Max Tolerable Downtime (MAD)
- Manual workaround available (Y/N plus description)
- Systems required (apps, databases, identity, network)
- Key vendors or third parties (SaaS, telecom, payment, logistics)
- Dependencies (upstream or downstream processes)
- Minimum staffing to operate
- Notes or constraints (office access, shift coverage, vendor limits)
SMB shortcut: Do this as a 60-minute workshop with leadership, IT, and ops.
Enterprise approach: Do it per value stream (order to cash, customer support, payroll) and link it to your application portfolio.
If your BIA exposes heavy reliance on third parties, clarify ownership early, especially if you are formalizing IT outsourcing services or defining responsibilities through IT infrastructure management services.
Step 2: Set RTO and RPO targets (with a worked example)
Once you know what matters, you need recovery targets that are realistic and defensible.
RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is how quickly a service must be restored.
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is how much data loss is acceptable, expressed as time.
Worked example: 3-tier recovery targets
- Tier 0: revenue or safety critical (checkout, payments, identity, customer support)
- RTO: 1 to 4 hours
- RPO: 0 to 15 minutes
- Tier 1: operationally critical (CRM, internal comms, inventory)
- RTO: 8 to 24 hours
- RPO: 1 to 4 hours
- Tier 2: important but deferrable (analytics, non-urgent reporting)
- RTO: 3 to 7 days
- RPO: 24 hours
The key insight is that RTO and RPO are business commitments, not just IT metrics. Tight targets usually imply cost and complexity: better observability, stronger change control, more redundancy, and more rigorous testing.
If you are building in cloud, it helps to understand what you are operating and what responsibilities stay with you. Many teams start with the advantages of Infrastructure as a Service and then clarify the difference between platform and infrastructure as a service so recovery scope is clear.
Step 3: Map dependencies beyond IT (the part most plans miss)
You can have great backups and still fail recovery because your plan assumes the world is intact.
A real continuity plan maps dependencies beyond infrastructure.
- Identity providers (SSO/MFA)
- DNS and certificates
- Network and telecom connectivity
- SaaS vendors (email, collaboration, ticketing)
- Payment processors
- Managed service providers
- Facilities access
- People availability (key roles, backups, on-call)
Dependency mapping checklist
- Identity: SSO/MFA provider, admin accounts, break-glass access
- Connectivity: ISP links, VPN/SD-WAN, critical routes
- Data: backup locations, encryption keys, retention policies
- Platforms: hypervisor or cloud platform, container platform, licensing
- SaaS: comms tools, CRM, ticketing, payroll
- Security: EDR, SIEM, immutable storage, privileged access
- Third parties: MSP/MSSP, telecom, payment, logistics, legal/PR
- Facilities: office access, alternate worksites
- People: named owners and backups, on-call rota
If you operate across environments, your continuity design often sits in hybrid reality, so it helps to understand approaches described in this guide to hybrid cloud providers in Singapore for US-based teams. If you are coordinating across multiple clouds or platforms, it’s also worth understanding the interoperability of inter-cloud services across different platforms.
If your recovery assumptions are tied to a specific virtualization stack, platform risk can become continuity risk. This overview of VMware alternatives helps teams sanity-check lock-in and recovery options.
Step 4: Build the Business Continuity Plan (BCP): people, process, communications
BCP is how the business operates while systems are degraded or offline. Strong BCPs answer three questions: who’s in charge, what do we do first, and how do we communicate without making things worse.
Roles and RACI starter template
- Incident Lead (Accountable): declares incident level, coordinates teams
- Business Continuity Lead (Responsible): continuity procedures and staffing/workarounds
- IT Recovery Lead (Responsible): DR execution and recovery order
- Security Lead (Consulted): incident response and cyber containment
- Communications Lead (Responsible): internal updates and customer messaging
- Vendor Liaison (Responsible): MSP and SaaS escalation
- Business Owners (Consulted): approve priorities and acceptable tradeoffs
0 to 24 to 72-hour continuity checklist
- 0 to 4 hours: stabilize, declare incident, start comms cadence, switch to manual workarounds
- 4 to 24 hours: confirm priorities, scale staffing, prepare customer updates, validate recovery scope
- 24 to 72 hours: restore key services, clear backlog, document decisions, begin after-action review
If you need a practical way to set expectations around response, escalation, and evidence of testing, this field guide to business IT support in Singapore for decision-makers provides a useful lens even for global teams establishing service standards.
Step 5: Build the Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP): runbooks, backups, recovery patterns
DR is where “we think we can recover” becomes “we can prove we can recover.”
DR runbook skeleton
- Scope: systems included, exclusions, dependencies
- Pre-requisites: access, break-glass accounts, keys, tooling
- Recovery order: identity, network, data, apps, integrations
- Recovery method: restore from backup, failover, rebuild
- Validation steps: functional checks, data integrity, security checks
- Communications: status updates, stakeholder sign-offs
- Rollback plan: rollback triggers and procedure
- Evidence capture: logs, timestamps, screenshots, owners
Backup and restore non-negotiables
- Backups that cannot be restored are not backups
- Restore testing must be scheduled and evidenced
- Use separation of duties for backup administration and consider immutable storage
If you’re evaluating providers or validating capabilities, it can help to benchmark against practical guidance like this IT guide to backup and disaster recovery from cloud computing service providers in Singapore. If your business is global but optimizing for Southeast Asia, this Singapore cloud VPS field guide to speed, cost, and compliance in Southeast Asia is useful when latency and governance affect DR design.
Modern DR increasingly depends on rebuild speed and consistency, which is why teams compare Infrastructure as Code vs Infrastructure as a Service and evaluate options across Infrastructure as a Service vendors to make recovery repeatable instead of heroic.
Cyber events (ransomware) need a BCDR playbook, not just backups
Ransomware is adversarial. You need speed and discipline.
First 60 minutes playbook
- Confirm incident and contain spread (isolate affected systems)
- Activate comms cadence and leadership updates
- Preserve evidence (avoid wiping logs or overwriting systems)
- Decide recovery posture (restore vs failover vs rebuild)
- Verify backup integrity and isolate backup systems from potential compromise
First 24 hours
- Prioritize Tier 0 services using your BIA and RTO/RPO
- Restore with validation (data integrity plus security checks)
- Publish customer communications with known facts and timelines
- Document decisions and begin corrective actions
If you want help strengthening controls that make recovery safer, a useful reference point is cloud security consulting services in Southeast Asia.
Testing and continuous improvement (a maturity ladder you can adopt)
If you don’t test, you don’t know your recovery capability.
Testing maturity ladder
- Tabletop exercise (quarterly): simulate a scenario and walk the plan
- Component restore test (monthly or quarterly): restore a database or app in isolation
- Partial failover test (semi-annual): fail over a critical component and validate dependencies
- Full-scale exercise (annual for Tier 0): end-to-end recovery with evidence and sign-off
After-action review mini-template
- What happened (timeline)
- What worked
- What failed and why
- Action items (owner and due date)
- When we re-test
Capacity constraints often block testing, so align resilience work with IT infrastructure capacity planning to avoid delays caused by resource shortages.
SMB vs enterprise implementation paths (choose what fits)
SMB: Minimum viable BCDR (2 to 4 weeks)
- One workshop BIA for top five processes
- Tiered RTO/RPO table (Tier 0/1/2)
- Basic comms tree plus escalation contacts
- Backup restore test for Tier 0 data
- One tabletop exercise plus an action list
Enterprise IT: Governance-ready BCDR (start here)
- Portfolio tiering linked to value streams
- Dependency mapping across SaaS, MSPs, identity, network
- Evidence-based testing program
- Vendor SLAs plus escalation embedded in runbooks
- Continuous improvement loop with owners and re-tests
Modern ownership lines often blur, so teams clarify responsibilities with frameworks like managed vs cloud services: the difference and which do you need.
When to DIY vs use a managed partner (and what to ask vendors)
DIY is reasonable when you have named owners and backups for every critical system, you can prove restore and failover with evidence, and you can maintain a testing cadence without harming operations.
A managed approach becomes attractive when teams are stretched thin, dependencies are complex, or 24/7 coverage is required with repeatable testing outcomes.
If you’re considering external support, resources like managed service providers (MSP) in Singapore and the overview of an Accrets managed service provider approach can help you define what “managed” should include: ownership, escalation, testing evidence, and continuous improvement.
From a solutions perspective, some organizations use managed backup services to formalize restore testing and retention, or IT DR as a Service when they want proven failover capabilities without building everything in-house. For day-to-day operational ownership, continuity often pairs with managed IT services so roles and escalation paths are clear when disruption hits.
Singapore and Southeast Asia considerations for global teams
If your business has customers or teams in Asia, or you’re choosing Singapore as a regional hub, continuity planning should consider latency to users, data residency requirements, and facility resilience expectations.
For a practical lens on why some US-based companies choose Singapore for regional infrastructure, this guide on Tier 2 data centers in Southeast Asia and when US companies should choose Singapore is a helpful starting point. If you’re comparing resilience terms, it also helps to understand a Tier 3 data center definition and what teams typically expect from a Tier 4 data center.
For regulated workloads, you may also need specialized governance considerations, where some public-sector teams reference GCC Government Cloud in Singapore, and financial services teams evaluate continuity in the context of requirements described in cloud banking solutions in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
Quick-start templates
Use these to operationalize everything above.
- BIA mini worksheet (from Step 1)
- Tiered RTO/RPO table (Tier 0/1/2)
- Dependency map checklist (identity, connectivity, data, SaaS, vendors, people)
- Communications starter scripts
- Internal: We are investigating. Next update at __. Do not take independent actions without coordination.
- Customer: We are experiencing disruption to __. We will provide our next update at __. Data integrity is a priority.
- DR runbook headings (scope, pre-reqs, recovery order, method, validation, comms, rollback, evidence)
If private infrastructure is part of your continuity posture, this overview of private cloud hosting services and why businesses prefer them in 2025 can help you sanity-check fit and operating requirements.
Conclusion
A strong BCDR program is a repeatable system: BIA, recovery objectives, dependency mapping, BCP roles and communications, DR runbooks and recovery methods, scheduled testing, and continuous improvement.If you want a second set of eyes on your current plan, or you want help turning recovery targets into a practical, testable design, fill the form for a free consultation with an Accrets Cloud Expert for business continuity planning and disaster recovery via the Accrets contact page. If you’re evaluating a partner-led approach, you can also see how Accrets positions its managed approach in the overview of its Managed Cloud Service Provider capabilities.
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.
