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BCI Continuity and Resilience Report 2025 — what matters for programme leads
In an increasingly unpredictable business environment, the 2025 BCI Continuity and Resilience Report reveals critical shifts and practical insights that programme leads must understand to drive effective continuity and resilience strategies.
If your role is to turn strategy into operational impact, the insights below will help you focus on disciplined planning, high-value exercising, and targeted investment in people and technology.
This year’s BCI report shows clearer separation between business continuity and resilience, steady but uneven leadership attention, and mixed progress on tooling.
The headline for practitioners is practical: double down on disciplined planning and exercising, modernise selectively, and keep the board’s focus on measurable operational impact.
The signal from the data
- Organisations are drawing a clearer line between business continuity and resilience
Nearly half now see a defined difference between the two, up from previous years, which reflects a shift toward resilience as a distinct strategic capability. - What BC delivers most often
Top reported outcomes remain exercising and testing 83.7 per cent, minimising internal impact 83.3 per cent, creating response and recovery plans 81.7 per cent, continuing to improve strategies 75.2 per cent, and setting downtime and data loss tolerances 68.3 per cent. - Ownership and sponsorship are improving, but still inconsistent
45.4 per cent have a dedicated person overseeing resilience who reports directly to the board, while 38.3 per cent do not.
At board level, 28.6 per cent already have a formal appointment responsible for resilience, and 42.3 per cent would like one but do not expect support to create it. - Skills profile is shifting toward problem solving and communication
For BC managers the top attributes are problem solver 87.5 per cent, process orientated 87.1 per cent, good planner 83.8 per cent, communicator 82.4 per cent, high level of experience 80.9 per cent, and collaborator 79.4 per cent. - Tooling remains uneven
Most used technologies are team collaboration tools 45.6 per cent, emergency notification 39.4 per cent, BC planning SaaS 35.2 per cent, and risk assessment software 32.1 per cent. AI tool use has more than doubled to 15.5 per cent, yet many still rely on spreadsheets and documents. - Support is trending up, with caveats
44.2 per cent report increased support from both financial and resource perspectives, although a meaningful minority report no increase or a reduction. - The five-year outlook prioritises capability over paperwork
Respondents expect incident-agnostic planning to matter most at 95.0 per cent, with senior management attention 83.2 per cent, cross-team collaboration 81.2 per cent, board support 79.2 per cent, and post-incident reviews 75.1 per cent.
What this means for programme leads
Clarify remit and reporting lines
If you operate BC and resilience as one function, define the boundaries of each and who is accountable to the board. Where you already have a resilience lead, formalise direct board reporting to shorten the distance between strategy and execution. The data shows organisations are moving this way, but gaps remain.
Keep exercising at the centre
Exercising and testing remain the highest value BC activities. Treat them as the backbone of the programme rather than an annual compliance event. Use them to validate impact tolerances, stress interdependencies, and build the evidence for leadership attention and funding.
Invest in people capability, not just headcount
Recruit and develop around problem solving, planning discipline, and communication. These attributes correlate with programmes that can translate risk into operational action and credible board narratives.
Modernise your tooling deliberately
A full platform overhaul is not the only path. Start where coordination and time to notification matter most, then add BC planning SaaS and risk assessment tools as workflows mature. Be explicit about the spreadsheet boundary to reduce version risk and improve auditability.
Engineer for distributed work
Design resilience for both offices and remote contexts. Prioritise practical measures such as energy-outage playbooks for remote staff, and define minimum standards for critical roles, including power and communications resilience.
Translate support into sustained funding
Support is rising but not uniform. Use training and exercising as visible proof points, tie them to board-level risks and tolerances, and show month-on-month metrics to avoid the post-deadline funding trough that some organisations report.
Final view
The profession is not standing still. The organisations that will lead are the ones that make exercising routine, clarify ownership to the board, modernise the tools that matter most, and design resilience for a distributed workforce. The five-year outlook is clear: incident-agnostic capability, senior attention, collaboration, and disciplined review cycles are where the gains will come from.
To learn more, speak to the experts at Battleground or book a meeting with Eli below to explore how your organisation can strengthen its continuity and resilience programme.
