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Safeguard Against Risk with Proactive Business Continuity Consulting

Our highly skilled consultants conceptualize, develop, and test your continuity and disaster recovery program across all critical business functions.

Business Continuity

Strengthen resilience across EHS, supply chain, and sustainability with expert business continuity consulting that keeps your operations moving.

From the company that developed ISO 22301, BSI consultants help you anticipate risks, protect people and processes, and maintain compliance so your business thrives through any disruption.

Disruptions can halt production, impact safety, and damage reputation. Our business continuity consulting empowers EHS, supply chain, and sustainability teams to identify vulnerabilities, develop robust recovery plans, and ensure compliance with global standards. From risk assessments to continuity testing, we help you safeguard critical operations and achieve resilience goals so you stay prepared, responsive, and sustainable in an unpredictable world.

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8 Steps for business continuity plan development

Below are the 8 critical steps for developing a business continuity plan that ensures your business can withstand disruptions and recover quickly.

Initiation & Governance

Foundation for business continuity management: secure leadership, define scope, set governance, and align with policy and regulatory needs.
Internal Review & Analysis

Map critical functions, processes, and dependencies to focus continuity planning on business priorities.
Business Impact Analysis

Identify downtime limits, set RTO/RPO, and prioritize recovery to reduce financial, operational, and reputational risk.
Risk Assessment

Analyze threats, vulnerabilities, and impacts to guide risk reduction and continuity strategies.
Strategy Development

Select cost-effective recovery strategies: remote work, backups, alternate sites, and supplier options.
Plan Development

Create actionable business continuity plans, IT recovery, and crisis plans to maintain or restore operations during disruptions.
Training & Awareness

Prepare staff with business continuity roles and responsibilities; build awareness for safe, effective response.
Testing & Validation

Run exercises and failover tests to verify plans, identify gaps, and improve business continuity readiness.

Identify and prepare for any potential threats

Understanding your risk profile across all operations, including the digital and supply chain footprint, allows us to provide customized solutions.

We assess potential vulnerabilities, threats, and risks to safeguard critical functions and assets.
We develop procedures to counter disruptions, natural or man-made, to support continuous operations.
We provide expert insights aiding regulatory compliance while fostering proactive risk management.
We offer sector-risk insights for resource prioritization and downtime management.

FAQs

Get answers to the most commonly asked questions about Business Continuity

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a proactive, ISO 22301-based framework for organizational resilience, covering governance, risk assessment, Business Impact Analysis (BIA), and continuity strategies. A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is the documented output of BCM, detailing steps to maintain critical operations during disruptions. Disaster Recovery (DR) is a reactive subset of BCP focused on restoring IT systems and infrastructure post-event. BCM ensures prevention and preparedness; DR addresses technology recovery.
Our approach is centered on you. We start by listening—understanding your vision, current state, risks, and priorities. Together, we identify and mitigate threats that could impact your goals, guiding your organization through a maturity journey from reactive to proactive resilience. This collaborative process accelerates progress toward strength and competitive advantage. Supporting this approach is BSI’s global expertise, proven frameworks, and extensive resources, ensuring your Business Continuity strategy meets ISO 22301 standards and best practices.
A fully integrated business resilience strategy delivers significant advantages: reduced risk exposure, faster recovery and continuity, improved organizational agility, stronger stakeholder trust, and optimized resource management. It aligns resilience with strategic growth and innovation, building competitive advantage, workforce stability, and a robust organizational culture. By adopting a comprehensive framework based on ISO 22301 principles, organizations can anticipate, withstand, and adapt to disruption through proactive prevention, mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery planning—resulting in lower costs, quicker response times, and long-term resilience.
Leadership for EHS exercises is typically driven by the emergency/continuity manager or a designated senior leader from the EHS team. They are responsible for developing the exercise in a confidential setting.

While the EHS team directs the process, successful exercises require representation from all critical areas, including: operations, facilities, human resources, leadership, and external responders. Participants may also take on roles as evaluators, controllers, and observers to ensure a comprehensive assessment of preparedness.
Organizations should start simple and gradually build complexity.

Tabletop Exercises (Discussion-Based): Best for new or untested plans. These involve a guided discussion in a conference room setting to ensure plan comprehension.

Functional Exercises: Once gaps from tabletop exercises are addressed, organizations move to functional exercises: hands-on, realistic simulations that activate specific functions (like a communications center) but do not involve full resource deployment.

Full-Scale Exercises (Operations-Based): Functional proficiency is a prerequisite. These are the most complex, involving the actual deployment of personnel and resources to simulate a complete, real-time emergency scenario.
EHS preparedness utilizes a broad spectrum of discussion-based and operations-based exercises, with the main distinction being scope and complexity:

A Drill is highly focused, designed to test a single task, specific equipment, or a single system (e.g., a fire alarm test or an evacuation route check).

A Full-Scale Exercise is the most comprehensive simulation, involving multiple teams, equipment, and often external responders. It is designed to mirror real-world complexity and requires the highest level of participation and engagement.
The primary goal of EHS (Environmental, Health, and Safety) emergency drills and exercises is to validate emergency plans, processes, and overall readiness. They are a critical component of a robust business continuity and risk management program. Specifically, conducting regular exercises helps organizations:

Validate current response plans and procedures;

Ensure practical application of safety measures;

Highlight resource gaps, shortfalls, and vulnerabilities;

Foster team coordination and communication; and

Trigger necessary corrective actions before an actual incident occurs.
EHS emergency plans should be reviewed and updated at a minimum annually, or immediately whenever significant operational changes occur (e.g., facility layout changes, new equipment, or process shifts).

Operational exercises (involving moving people or equipment) should occur annually. Smaller tabletop drills or procedure reviews should be scheduled more frequently based on industry standards, the organization's risk level, and known potential risks (e.g., a severe weather forecast or recent regulatory updates).

Recognized Expertise

Globally recognized leaders in risk management and business continuity

Our global consultants are passionate about empowering organizations to thrive amidst uncertainty with decades of proven success.

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Our Experts

Tony Pelli, Global Practice Director, Security & Resilience

Tony has extensive experience in risk assessment, supplier risk management and strategy, to build customized supply chain risk management solutions.

Our Experts

Maria McAhron, Consultant, Security and Resilience

Maria has 20+ years as a multilingual business continuity and IT implementation specialist with expertise in risk management and ISO 22301.

Our Experts

Paul Raw, Senior Consultant, specializing in enterprise risk & resilience

Paul has 20 years of experience supporting business continuity programs including strategic prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery planning.

Our Experts

David Blacksberg, Senior Consultant, specializing in Business Continuity

David has more than 25 year of experience in business continuity and emergency management program development.

Our Process

Providing a business continuity program based on your organization's goals

We craft unique and actionable solutions that build engagement from your organization and trust from your stakeholders.

Analysis and evaluation
Leadership and governance
Business continuity solution
Implementation

Analysis and evaluation

Our comprehensive approach encompasses a business risk analysis; works with you to complete a business impact analysis; crafts response/recovery strategies; trains, validates, and assesses while adhering to business continuity standards (ISO 22301).

Leadership and governance

We assess your business policies while advising top decision-makers to align strategic planning with global, national, and regional regulations, ensuring stakeholder buy-in.

Business continuity solution

We create tailored sets of solutions, from plans and response structures, to management information and testing, and implement exercise schedules.

Implementation

We offer training, repeatable solutions, and testing regimes to ensure your organization has the right processes in place.

Capabilities

Resilience against all types of disruption events

Bolster threat resilience, including natural disasters, supply chain disruptions, site security, and more, while ensuring worker safety.

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Training

Covering a spectrum of scenarios in a variety of formats

Instructors combine technical expertise, first-hand industry knowledge, and innovative delivery methods for a dynamic learning experience.

Diverse consulting training exercise

Incorporate our tailored options and exercise solutions across varying levels of complexity from discussion-based, through functional, to full-scale.

Training Development

Tailored: We send experts to understand your specific training needs, ensuring precise solutions.

Empower your workforce

Enable a culture of learning and development to address knowledge gaps and personal development for workforce retention.

Where we can help

BSI is a globally recognized risk management and business continuity leader; our experts help accelerate growth with tailored strategic plans to meets your unique needs.

Whether you are getting started, need help moving through the process, or want to restructure your program, our business continuity team will work with you during any phase of maturity.

Our experts

Our experts believe in the transformative power of preparedness and are driven by a passion for empowering organizations to thrive, even in the face of uncertainty.

Our background in best practices and standards means our experts have a proven track record in providing tailored solutions to diverse industries, instilling confidence in clients, and forging a path towards sustainable success.

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