business-continuity-designlisted

# Business Continuity Design Use this skill when a product or organization must continue critical work during outages, supplier loss, cyber incidents, facility disruption, staffing shortages, or degraded dependencies. Continuity includes people, processes, technology, data, communications, and decisions; a backup or disaster-recovery runbook alone is not a continuity plan. ## Establish the continuity contract Identify critical services and user outcomes, owners, stakeholders, regions, legal or contractual duties, planning horizon, and assumptions. Perform a bounded business-impact analysis covering minimum acceptable service, priority tiers, time-to-harm, maximum tolerable downtime, data-loss tolerance, and the impact of interruption on customers, safety, revenue, operations, compliance, and reputation. Inventory critical people, facilities, suppliers, systems, data, communication paths, and operator access. Map dependencies, single points of failure, concentration risk, and manual fallback capacity. Separate stated RTO/RPO goals from measured capability; a policy does not prove a recovery objective is met. ## Design resilient operating modes For each critical service define normal, degraded, manual, and recovery modes. Document entry criteria, declaration authority, allowed functionality, customer and staff communications, data consistency rules, security controls, capacity limits, and exit criteria. Graceful degradation must not silently weaken identity, authorization