Glossary
Business Continuity
Maintaining critical business functions during and after disruption — including Microsoft 365 service incidents.
Business continuity (BC) is the discipline of maintaining critical business functions during and after disruption — including Microsoft 365 service incidents, broader IT outages, natural disasters, and other events. Broader than disaster recovery (DR), which focuses specifically on recovery of technical systems. For Microsoft 365 customers, BC planning includes: identifying critical-path workflows, defining recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), documenting alternate work patterns (phone fallback when Teams is down, in-person meetings when remote tooling fails), maintaining off-platform data copies, and pre-templated internal communications for Microsoft service incidents. Mature organisations practice BC plans through tabletop exercises and post-incident retrospectives.