Most teams base their business continuity strategies on the assumption that backups can help them recover after an outage. But creating file copies of your data in a separate location is just one layer in a plan to protect your data from ransomware, accidental deletions, or data corruption.
Data loss isn’t the only consequence of a disruption. There’s also loss of access: stolen credentials and administrator lockouts. And if the cloud vendor that underpins your email, file storage, and collaboration tools fails, you also lose time.
To get operations back online, you’ll need a complete business continuity plan that allows you to log in, talk to your team, and contain the damage.
What are business continuity strategies?
Business continuity is the set of plans, processes, and procedures an organization uses to keep essential functions running during and after disruptions. It typically includes risk assessment, emergency response procedures, communication plans, backup and recovery, staff training, as well as a regular schedule for testing and updating that plan.
The FFIEC’s Business Continuity Management booklet(new window) (written for financial institutions but broadly applicable) emphasizes that business continuity planning is about maintaining, resuming, and recovering the business, not only the technology.
Business continuity vs. disaster recovery planning
Business continuity strategies often get conflated with disaster recovery planning, and both are sometimes confused with incident response. They work together, but have different goals.
| Incident response | Disaster recovery | Business continuity planning |
| Detect the threat, remove it from affected systems, and investigate impact to prevent recurrence. | Restore IT systems and data after disruption. | Keep essential operations running during disruption, even when technology is degraded. |
Why having a business continuity strategy matters
Disruptions are inevitable. Businesses now depend on tools that all run on the same three clouds: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS.
When these infrastructures fail, thousands of businesses go down with them. Infrastructure failures of the extent and severity of 2024’s CrowdStrike outage(new window) and October 2025’s AWS outage(new window) shut down airlines, hospitals, payment systems, and everyday business tools in a matter of hours..
In a technical outage, you’re immobilized. Until your vendor recovers, you can’t.
Operating through a crisis isn’t the only consideration. Business continuity overlaps with governance and compliance. Recognized frameworks such as ISO 22301(new window) now require evidence that continuity is repeatable, owned, and tested.
That means:
- It has to be repeatable. Document your critical functions, define what “downtime” means in measurable terms, and produce proof that the controls you’ve chosen work and have improved over time.
- It has to be owned: Someone should be accountable for the plan, with named roles and clear decision-making authority. Everyone should know what their role is when something goes wrong.
- It has to be tested: Some organizations rehearse scenarios (authentication outage tied to a SaaS provider, credential compromise that forces rapid rotations, ransomware that requires isolation and emergency access changes) that stress the whole organization in realistic conditions with limited staff, uncertain scope, and restricted access.
How to create a strong business continuity strategy
If your only plan is to restore from backup, you’re underestimating the operational complexity of incidents. This plan helps you reduce your most likely downtime drivers and make recovery actions feasible under stress.
1. Know what needs to keep working
A good business impact analysis and an accurate risk assessment are foundational to an effective business continuity plan. To define which functions are critical, ask your IT team, department heads, and operations leads what happens if you lose access to your:
- Identity providers and admin consoles
- Password and key storage
- Shared inboxes and customer communication channels
- Finance tools and payment workflows
- Vendor access paths and integrations
Mapping these dependencies will give you a full picture of which tools would fail together in an outage.
2. Control access, control the incident
Credentials are the control layer. They determine who can act, how fast you can contain the damage, and whether your team can keep working without compromising on security.
Before an incident, establish a structure for:
- Roles that limit what each person can access by default
- Dedicated admin accounts
- A documented procedure for emergency access when normal authentication fails
- Clear ownership of every critical system and credential vault
- Regular checks that access rights are current, and a process for removing them when someone leaves
- Centralized, access-controlled password storage
The fewer unknown credentials, the faster you can contain an incident and get operations back online.
3. Create a credential compromise playbook
Credential compromise often triggers the most disruptive continuity actions: triggering mass resets, revoked sessions, forced multi-factor authentication (MFA) changes, access reviews, and emergency communications. For smaller businesses, the impact is particularly acute: Proton’s 2026 SMB Cybersecurity Report(new window) found that one in four suffered a cyberattack or breach in the past year.
A credential compromise playbook should answer:
- How do we detect signs of compromise?
- Who can revoke access and where?
- What do we rotate first (high-privilege accounts, shared vaults, API keys)?
- How do we communicate changes without leaking secrets?
- How do we keep customer-facing operations running during resets?
Interrogating these areas of credential exposure will help you identify what happened, contain it, and understand it well enough to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
4. Use encryption to shrink the blast radius
Encryption is typically framed as a compliance checkbox. In continuity terms, encryption reduces blast radius when things go wrong.
Examples:
- End-to-end encryption(new window) models limit visibility of sensitive content, which can matter for risk posture and data protection.
- Zero-knowledge encryption means your vendor cannot access your data even if legally compelled
- Encrypted credential vaults protected by access keys reduce the risk of secrets being exposed through device compromise or insecure storage
- Strong encryption also supports safer collaboration (sharing access without exposing secrets in plain text).
This is also where many teams get stuck: they want encryption, but they worry it will slow down work. The right tools make encryption part of normal workflows, not a special process people use to bypass.
How does Proton Workspace support continuity strategies?
Proton Workspace(new window) is designed to fill the role of an out-of-band communications layer when your primary infrastructure vendor goes down.
It runs on infrastructure that’s entirely independent of Google, Microsoft, and AWS, and is end-to-end encrypted, so even Proton can’t access your data. And because Proton operates under Swiss jurisdiction, it isn’t subject to the CLOUD Act or FISA. Your data stays yours, including during an active incident.
Proton’s security experts work with your IT team in advance to set up accounts in line with your existing continuity framework. Your security teams, IT administrators and leadership can configure and test accounts in advance, and instantly activate pre-provisioned accounts for the rest of your staff when an incident occurs.
When an incident occurs, there’s no setup required. Your teams immediately have everything they need:
- Proton Mail(new window): send contracts to legal, update investors, and coordinate with suppliers without requiring them to download anything new
- Proton Drive(new window), Docs(new window), and Sheets(new window): collaborate, review, and sign off on decisions in real time, even when your existing shared drives are unreachable
- Proton Calendar(new window) and Meet(new window): keep hosting video conferences on a platform unaffected by the outage
- Proton VPN(new window): keep connections private when your team is working from unfamiliar networks during an incident
- Proton Pass(new window) reduces the risk of credential incidents and accelerates incident containment, giving you access to every account and system you need when your usual single-sign on is unavailable
The right time to build the infrastructure is before you need it. To find out how Proton Workspace fits in, learn more about our new business continuity offering(new window).
