Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Policy - SME

The Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Policy (P32S) has been crafted to help organizations, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs) without dedicated IT teams, maintain operations and recover essential IT services in the face of disruptive events such as cyberattacks, power outages, and system failures. Recognizing the unique challenges faced by SMEs, the policy provides a practical and clear framework for continuity planning that fosters organizational resilience and regulatory adherence. This policy’s scope is comprehensive, requiring applicability to all business-critical systems and services, employees, and external IT providers. It ensures readiness for a broad range of disruptions, including but not limited to cyber incidents, hardware malfunctions, or physical inaccessibility to workspaces. The policy covers pivotal areas: backup management, business continuity planning (BCP), disaster recovery operations, staff preparedness, and regulatory response. It specifically calls for departments to define and annually test continuity workarounds for their top three critical functions, ensuring alternative workflows are available when primary systems fail. One of the distinguishing attributes of P32S is its adaptation for SMEs, as signaled by the SME policy notation and the assignment of the General Manager (GM) as the policy’s owner. The GM is accountable for policy approval, continuity plan maintenance, regulatory reports (such as GDPR notifications), and coordination of incident response. External IT providers and department leaders play key supporting roles, ensuring that critical backup processes, recovery actions, and alternate operations are executed and documented. This arrangement ensures effective continuity practices without the overhead complexity unsuited to smaller organizations. Central to the policy is the emphasis on compliance with international and regional standards, including ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO/IEC 27002:2022, NIST SP 800-53 Rev.5, EU GDPR, NIS2, DORA, and COBIT 2019. The policy meticulously maps out required activities such as maintaining and testing BCPs, documenting all risk assessments and residual risk acceptance, and providing staff training. Transparent governance mechanisms ensure audit-readiness; organizations must demonstrate not only ongoing process improvement but also the maintenance and accessibility of updated plans, backup validation reports, and training documentation for internal and supplier personnel. Annual testing of the BCP and DR plans is a mandatory requirement, along with scenario-based staff walkthroughs and technical restore tests. The policy also requires rigorous backup standards, adherence to restoration procedures, and thorough post-incident reviews. Non-compliance by staff or service providers can lead to disciplinary action, contract review, regulatory reporting, or loss of organizational trust. In sum, this policy offers SMEs a robust, regulation-aligned, and actionable path to business continuity and disaster recovery.