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# Use cases for business continuity planning

# Use cases for business continuity planning {#ariaid-title1}

* Release version: Australia
* 
* Updated March 12, 2026
* 
* ![](https://www.servicenow.com/docs/portal-asset/ico-clock) 3 minutes to read

Summarize  
![AI sparkle icon](https://servicenow.com/docs/portal-asset/ai-sparkle-icon) Summarized using AI  
This content was generated using new OpenAI-powered functionality. Results are provided on an as is basis and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete.  

## Summary of Use cases for business continuity planning

The Business Continuity Management (BCM) application provides a framework to create, manage, and execute business continuity plans (BCP) tailored to your organization's recovery strategies.
These plans help mitigate risks during disruptive events, such as a malware attack, by enabling preventive actions like shutting down services, restoring from disaster recovery, and relocating essential servers.
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## Key Use Cases

* **Create a standardized recovery plan:** Develop and manage plan records through defined states (Draft, In review, Pending approval, Approved, Archived) to address assets, recovery teams, documentation, and procedures.
* **Update dependencies in the plan:** View and configure affected assets, monitor recovery time objectives (RTO), recovery point objectives (RPO), recovery tiers, and identify gaps or risks.
* **Configure dependencies for plans:** Customize sources for dependency data (CMDB, BIA downstream/upstream), notification recipients, fields to update, and applicable plan types.
* **Create documentation:** Use templates and sections to document goals, objectives, and scopes within each plan.
* **Create recovery teams:** Define teams responsible for executing recovery tasks during plan implementation.
* **Monitor loss scenarios:** Add crisis scenarios (e.g., loss of datacenters, vendor disruptions) to plans, including asset dependencies and recovery strategies.
* **Submit plans for approval:** Configure and standardize approval workflows involving groups, users, and rules, then submit plans accordingly.
* **Generate PDF summaries:** Produce formatted PDF documents summarizing plan details, including scopes, dependencies, teams, and tasks, with customizable templates and scripts.
* **Copy plans:** Duplicate existing plans with all associated details and related lists for reuse or modification.
* **Add related plans:** Link related plans carefully to avoid cyclic dependencies and ensure proper task execution order.
* **Manage task execution order:** Organize recovery tasks in parallel or sequential order based on dependencies to ensure efficient plan execution.

## Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

By leveraging these use cases, ServiceNow customers can build comprehensive, customizable business continuity plans that align with their organizational structure and recovery needs. The application facilitates clear documentation, team coordination, risk monitoring, and approval workflows, ensuring preparedness for various crisis scenarios. Automated dependency updates, plan duplication, and PDF generation enhance efficiency, while controls to prevent cyclic dependencies safeguard plan integrity. Ultimately, these capabilities enable faster, well-coordinated responses to disruptions, minimizing operational impact.  
This section describes the common use cases that are used for business continuity planning in the Business Continuity Management application. You can deploy these use cases individually or you can combine them to meet your specific needs.

You can build your business continuity plan based on your recovery strategy, partners, teams, tools, and processes that are needed to implement the plan.  
Consider an example of a malware attack on a corporation. The attack may disrupt critical services such as utilities, transportation, payments, and so on. If a business continuity plan is in place, the emergency IT consultants and professionals can implement preventive actions:

* Shut down the IT services.
* Restore the services from the disaster data recovery component in the plan.
* Control the damage by moving the essential data servers to an off-site location.
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## Use cases for planning {#bcp-use-cases__section_jr4_dq5_bcc}

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| Use case name | Description | Roles | Actions for the use case |
|-|-|-|-|
| Create a standardized recovery plan | BCP helps you enact and mitigate risk at the time of an event by addressing action items such as plan assets, activities, recovery teams, documentation, policies, and procedures. The plan record goes through a cycle of states before: * Draft -\> In review -\> Pending approval -\> Approved -\> Archived * In the Pending approval state, plan can be rejected back to Returned state. {#bcp-use-cases__ul_xy4_lq5_bcc} | BCM planner, BCM manager, BCM administrator | User creates a plan. |
| Update dependencies in the plan | Update dependencies in the plan: 1. Enables users to view and configure the assets that are affected within the plan. 2. Monitor the RTO, RPO, and Recovery Tier of each asset and identify any gaps/risks when the asset is down. 3. View the relationship of the primary assets and related assets. | BCM planner, BCM manager, BCM administrator | User selects Update dependencies button. The Update BCP dependencies snapshot scheduled job is executed. |
| Configure the dependencies for plan | Provide configurations for users to configure what dependencies they want for plans including: 1. Configure the sources that they want to pull in from their dependencies including CMDB, BIA downstream, BIA upstream. 2. Choose whether they want to pull the last updated record or all records from the source. 3. Configure the users and groups that they want to notify via emails. 4. Configure the fields that are updated when dependencies are updated. 5. Configure what type of plans the configurations should be applied to. {#bcp-use-cases__ol_c3l_rq5_bcc} | BCM administrator | User creates or updates records by navigating to All -\> Planning dependency update configuration. |
| Create documentations | Provides a section and templates for the user to document the goals, objectives, and scopes that are required within the context of the plan. | BCM planner, BCM manager, BCM administrator | User creates a plan using a plan template with document sections defined. User creates a section in the Documentation tab. |
| Create recovery teams | Defines the teams responsible for executing the plans during the recovery process. It is used in recovery tasks. | BCM planner, BCM manager, BCM administrator | User selects New button in the Recovery teams related list. |
| Monitor the loss scenarios of the plan | Create crisis scenarios that can be included in your plan (for example, Loss of Datacenters or Vendor disruption). Then add assets dependencies or recovery strategies to the loss scenarios. | BCM planner, BCM manager, BCM administrator | User creates a plan using a plan template with loss scenarios defined. User adds the loss scenarios. |
| Submit for approval | Create approval configurations including groups, users, or rules to standardize the approval process. | BCM planner, BCM manager, BCM administrator | User submits the plan for approval. |
| Generate PDF | Summarize the details of the plan (scopes, asset dependencies, related plans, recovery teams, recovery tasks) in a PDF format. 2. Enables users to write scripts and format the PDF through document templates, and document scripts. | BCM planner, BCM manager, BCM administrator | User generates PDF of the plan. |
| Copy plan | Copy existing plans including their details and related lists. | BCM planner, BCM manager, BCM administrator | User copies the plan. |
| Add related plan | Add the related plan to the related list. | BCM planner, BCM manager, BCM administrator | User adds a related plan. |
| Avoid creating cyclic tasks for the same plan while adding plan dependencies. | Stop processing same plan if it's already part of the hierarchy. Avoid creation such plan dependencies during planning phase. Verify that plan dependency in recovery task doesn't create a cycle. | BCM planner, BCM manager, BCM administrator | User adds an activated plan to the plan recovery task. |
| Task execution order | Tasks under a plan can be parallel and sequential based on the task dependencies. Therefore, the tasks in a plan should be ordered. | BCM planner, BCM manager, BCM administrator | User adds recovery tasks. |
[Table 1. Typical BCP use cases]

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