A business continuity plan (or BCP, for Business Continuity Plan) is a logistical plan for the practice of how an organization should recover and restore its partially or completely interrupted critical functions within a predetermined time after an unwanted interruption or disaster. In the United States, government entities refer to the process as Continuity Of Operations Planning (COOP).

In simple terms, BCP is how an organization prepares for future incidents that may jeopardize it and its core long-term mission. Possible situations include local incidents (such as fires, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, etc.), regional, national or international incidents, and incidents such as pandemics, etc.

Initially, planning and prevention activities were directed towards IT operations, which in most cases were centralized in the IT Department and even in a specific physical location. However, with the passage of time and the appearance of distributed computing, supported by computer and telematic means widespread in all areas of the organization, this activity varied its scope and was called Business Continuity Planning, which could be translated as business continuity planning.[1]​.

Within the framework of the Business Continuity Plan, the IT or technology department can develop its own specific Contingency Plan to address possible disruption or disaster scenarios related to technology. This IT Contingency Plan focuses on the specific measures and actions that must be taken to ensure the continuity of IT systems and services in crisis situations.

Business continuity is a concept that belongs to a higher discipline called "Business Continuity Management (BCM) and encompasses both the disaster recovery plan (DRP), typically technological in nature, and the business restoration plan, which typically focuses on critical business processes. In addition, "Crisis Management" and "incident management" plans are usually part of the complete discipline of BCM. Disaster recovery is the ability to respond to an interruption of technological services by implementing a plan to restore critical functions of the organization. Both differ from loss prevention planning, which involves the scheduling of activities such as system backup, authentication and authorization (security), virus checking and monitoring of system utilization (mainly for capacity checks).

This plan is the response planned by the company to those risk situations that may critically affect it, that is, preventing the technological operation that supports the most important business processes. No matter the size of the company or the cost of the security measures implemented, every organization needs a Disaster Recovery Plan or a Business Continuity Plan, since sooner or later they will encounter a security incident or some event that suddenly stops the operation of a company.