Business continuity planning

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Business continuity planning

    Business continuity planning in ServiceNow enables organizations to prepare for and mitigate risks during disruptive events. It involves creating detailed plans that cover activities, documentation, loss scenarios, recovery teams, and approvals. The planning is managed through the Business Continuity Management (BCM) UIB Workspace, allowing organizations to systematically address different crisis scenarios and ensure resilience.

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    Key Features

    • Structured Workflow: The BCM Workspace supports a structured workflow for developing, reviewing, approving, and archiving business continuity plans.
    • Plan Creation and Management: Business continuity plans can be created from the Home page or Planning record list, with options to add scope, documentation, recovery teams, and related plans.
    • Review and Approval Process: Plans undergo review by business impact analysis owners and approval by business managers, IT managers, or BCM leads before being finalized.
    • Task Automation: Structured workflows guide task management related to business continuity plans.
    • Asset and Plan Integration: Assets and plans related to business continuity are identified using CMDB data, facilitating accurate dependency assessments during planning.
    • Recovery Teams and Loss Scenarios: Users can define recovery teams with specific roles and identify loss scenarios pertinent to departments or business units to tailor continuity plans.
    • PDF Generation: Plan owners can generate and save PDFs of approved business continuity plans for reference and distribution.

    Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers

    As a ServiceNow customer, you can leverage Business Continuity Planning to create comprehensive, approved plans that prepare your organization for various disruptions. The integrated workflow ensures accountability and proper governance through defined roles and approval steps. Using CMDB data to connect assets to the plan enhances accuracy and relevance, while the BCM Workspace’s structured tasks help maintain progress and clarity. This capability supports regulatory compliance, risk mitigation, and operational resilience.

    In addition, administrators have setup tasks available to configure the BCM environment effectively, and planners have multiple creation paths for flexibility in managing continuity plans. The solution accommodates common use cases that can be deployed individually or combined to meet your organization's specific continuity requirements.

    Business continuity planning helps you enact and mitigate risk at the time of an event. You can address and plan on the primary scope of the activities, documentation, loss scenarios, recovery teams, approvals, and so on. You can then configure a structured workflow of your business continuity planning tasks in BCM UIB Workspace.

    When you create a comprehensive business continuity plan for different possible disruptive scenarios, your organization is equipped to face a crisis or any adverse situation.

    Steps involved in creating a business continuity plan

    Typically, the following steps involved in creating a business continuity plan:
    • The BCM program manager or planner creates a business continuity plan either from the Home page or the Planning record page in the List view of the BCM UIB Workspace.
    • The BCM program manager or planner adds additional details for the business continuity plan such as its scope, documentation section, recovery teams, related plans, and so on.
    • The business impact analysis owner reviews the information and submits the analysis for a review and approval to the business manager for services or IT manager for applications respectively.
    • The business manager, IT manager, or BCM lead review the details of the business continuity plan and approve it.
    • The approved business continuity plan is moved to Approved and later, it is moved to the Archived state.
    • The business continuity plan owner can generate the PDF of the plan and save a copy for reference.

    A typical business continuity plan workflow is shown in the following example:

    Business continuity plan workflow.

    Setup tasks for business continuity planning

    If you are the BCP administrator, you can view Setup for a business continuity plan for information on the BCP setup tasks.

    Creating a business continuity plan in Business Continuity Workspace

    if you are the business continuity plan owner, you can create a business continuity plan in Business Continuity Workspace by using one of the following options:

    • You can navigate to the Planning tab in the Home page and select Create BCP as shown in the following example.

      Planning tab in the Home page.

      For the description of the cards and action buttons in the Planning tab of the Home page, see Home page view.

    • You can also navigate to the List view and select New in the Planning records.

    To create a business continuity plan in Business Continuity Workspace, see Create a business continuity plan. For information on managing tasks related to a business continuity plan, see Structured workflows for BCPs.