Use cases for business continuity planning

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Use cases for business continuity planning

    The Business Continuity Management (BCM) application in ServiceNow offers a range of use cases to help organizations build, manage, and execute effective business continuity plans. These use cases can be deployed individually or combined to create tailored plans that address recovery strategies, involved teams, tools, and processes. Business continuity planning is essential for mitigating risks during disruptive events such as ransomware attacks by enabling rapid response and recovery of critical services.

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    Key Features

    • Create a standardized recovery plan: Develop comprehensive plans covering assets, activities, teams, documentation, policies, and procedures. Plans progress through defined states like Draft, In Review, Pending Approval, Approved, and Archived.
    • Update dependencies in the plan: View and configure affected assets, monitor Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and Recovery Tier, and understand asset relationships to identify risks when assets are down.
    • Configure dependencies: Set up sources of dependency data (e.g., CMDB, Business Impact Analysis), choose update preferences, define notification recipients, and specify which plan fields and plan types the configurations apply to.
    • Create documentation: Utilize templates and sections to document plan goals, objectives, and scope directly within the plan.
    • Create recovery teams: Define teams responsible for executing recovery tasks during plan activation.
    • Monitor loss scenarios: Define crisis scenarios (e.g., loss of datacenters, vendor disruption) and associate asset dependencies and recovery strategies to simulate realistic disruptions.
    • Submit for approval: Standardize the approval process by configuring approval groups, users, and rules within the system.
    • Generate PDF reports: Summarize plan details including scopes, dependencies, teams, and tasks into customizable PDF documents for distribution and record-keeping.
    • Copy and relate plans: Easily duplicate existing plans with their details and add relationships between plans to maintain structured continuity strategies, while preventing cyclic dependencies.
    • Manage task execution order: Organize recovery tasks within a plan to run sequentially or in parallel based on dependencies, ensuring an efficient recovery process.

    Key Outcomes

    • Enables ServiceNow customers to build comprehensive and adaptable business continuity plans aligned with organizational recovery strategies.
    • Facilitates risk mitigation through clear documentation, defined recovery teams, and scenario planning.
    • Improves coordination and communication by automating dependency updates, approval workflows, and notification configurations.
    • Supports audit and compliance needs with detailed plan documentation and PDF export capabilities.
    • Enhances recovery execution by managing task dependencies and avoiding planning errors like cyclic task creation.

    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 the example of a ransomware attack on a financial 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 take the following 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.

    Typical use cases for Business Continuity Planning

    Table 1. Typical BCP use cases
    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 will go 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.
    		 BCM Planner, BCM Manager, BCM Admin User creates a plan
    Update dependencies in the plan Update dependencies in the plan:

    1. Allows 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 Admin

    User selects Update dependencies button.

    2. Scheduled job Update BCP dependencies snapshot 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 what plan's fields will be updated every time they update the dependencies
    5. Configure what type of plans the configurations should be applied to
    		 BCM Admin

    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 Admin

    User creates a plan using a plan template with document sections defined.

    2. User selects Create new section in the Documentation tab.
    Create recovery teams Defines the teams responsible for executing the plans during the recovery process. It is currently used in recovery tasks BCM Planner, BCM Manager, BCM Admin 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) and add assets dependencies or recovery strategies to the loss scenarios. BCM Planner, BCM Manager, BCM Admin

    User creates a plan using a plan template with Loss scenarios defined.

    2. User selects Add in the Loss scenarios tab.
    Submit for Approval Create approval configurations including groups, users, or rules to standardize the approval process BCM Planner, BCM Manager, BCM Admin User selects Submit for approval.
    Generate PDF

    Summarize the details of the plan (scopes, asset dependencies, related plans, recovery teams, recovery tasks) in a PDF format.

    2. Allows users to write scripts and format the PDF through document templates, and document scripts.

    		 BCM Planner, BCM Manager, BCM Admin User selects the Generate PDF button.
    Copy Plan Copy existing plans including their details and related lists BCM Planner, BCM Manager, BCM Admin User selects the Copy button.
    Add related plan Add related plan relationship to plan's related list. BCM Planner, BCM Manager, BCM Admin User adds a related plan.
    Avoid creating cyclic tasks for the same plan while adding plan dependencies. Stop processing same plan if its 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 Admin 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 Admin User adds recovery tasks