A Business Continuity Plan is the answer to "what do we do when the office, the cloud region, or the supplier goes dark?" It is a planning artefact rather than a control: a documented set of arrangements that lets the business keep delivering its essential services while normal operations are degraded. NIS2 makes a BCP an effective regulatory expectation for in-scope organisations, and ISO 22301 is the international standard that gives the work a recognised shape.
The discipline starts with a business impact analysis. For each critical service, the planning team agrees the maximum tolerable downtime, the recovery time objective, and the recovery point objective. Those numbers drive everything downstream: the backup regime, the failover architecture, the staffing rota, and the supplier contracts that promise to support recovery within the stated windows.
A BCP that has never been rehearsed is documentation rather than continuity. The test schedule matters as much as the plan itself, and tabletop exercises that walk a leadership team through a plausible scenario typically expose more gaps than full failovers do. The Askara Solutions agent keeps the BCP, the BIA outputs, and the test evidence in the same operating record as the risk register, so the regulator can see one coherent story rather than three documents written by three teams.