ISO 22301 is the international standard for a business continuity management system, and it is certifiable, which is why it turns up in customer questionnaires and tenders. It gives you a management-system structure for continuity in the same way ISO 27001 does for information security. It is not a US legal requirement, and certifying to it does not by itself satisfy FINRA 4370 or the HIPAA contingency plan standard, which have their own named elements.

Business continuity plan software for business continuity management and disaster recovery planning

Business continuity plan software holds the plans, dependencies, recovery objectives and test records that let an organization keep operating through a disruption, and holds the evidence that the plan was reviewed. In a regulated US firm the plan is not just an operations artifact. It is examinable: FINRA Rule 4370 requires broker-dealers to maintain a written business continuity plan and review it annually, HIPAA requires a contingency plan at 45 CFR 164.308(a)(7), and bank examiners work from the FFIEC Business Continuity Management booklet.

Complianceofficer is the obligations half of that problem, and we say so plainly. We do not run your business impact analysis workshops and we do not send mass notifications. We keep the continuity obligations that apply to you identified, owned, mapped to controls and current, and we tell you the day one of the underlying rules moves. Below is what those rules actually say, read from the rule text rather than from a vendor summary, and what the market looks like after four years of consolidation.

Last updated September 2026. Every rule citation below was read from its primary source and every vendor pricing URL was opened on 2 September 2026.

Scan which continuity obligations already apply to you

Pick your industry and size, then the regimes you operate under. The scan returns the obligations that apply to an organization like yours, what moved in the last twelve months, and the primary source behind each line. No signup, nothing stored.

§ Live · Compliance scan

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Industry

Region

Frameworks you answer to

SOC 2 ISO 27001 GDPR HIPAA AML / KYC SOX PCI DSS

Also check regulatory changes from the last 12 months (takes a few seconds)

Sample register · fintech, US · what a scan returns

§ 01 Written AML program with a named officer BSA
§ 02 KYC and customer due diligence FinCEN CDD
§ 03 Sanctions screening lists Changed
§ 04 PCI DSS v4.0 validation Watching

§ 167 The rules

Who is actually required to have a business continuity plan

This is the question that decides how much software you need, and the answers are more uneven than the vendor market implies. Some US regulators name the plan, name its contents and name a review frequency. Others reach it indirectly through a general program rule. One well-known case has no rule at all, despite a great deal of published content asserting otherwise. Each row below was read from the rule text or the issuing agency, not from a summary.

US business continuity obligations by regulator, verified 2 September 2026
Who	Source	What it requires	Review or test cadence
Broker-dealers	FINRA Rule 4370	A written business continuity plan, reasonably designed, addressing ten named elements; customer disclosure at account opening and on the website; two emergency contact persons filed with FINRA	Annual review, plus update on any material change
HIPAA covered entities and business associates	45 CFR 164.308(a)(7)	A contingency plan standard with three Required specifications (data backup plan, disaster recovery plan, emergency mode operation plan) and two Addressable ones	Testing and revision procedures are Addressable, not Required
Banks and credit unions	FFIEC IT Examination Handbook, Business Continuity Management booklet, November 2019	Enterprise-wide, process-oriented resilience covering technology, business operations, testing and communications; examined, not a rule as such	Set by the entity and challenged at examination
NYDFS covered entities	23 NYCRR 500.16	Incident response plans and business continuity and disaster recovery plans as part of the cybersecurity program, based on the entity's own risk assessment	Scoped to cybersecurity events, not to every disruptive event
SEC-registered investment advisers	No dedicated rule. Reached via 17 CFR 275.206(4)-7	Proposed Rule 206(4)-4 (Release IA-4439, File S7-13-16) was never adopted. Examiners expect a plan under the general compliance program rule	The 206(4)-7 review is required no less frequently than annually
Anyone answering a customer questionnaire	ISO 22301	A certifiable business continuity management system. Contractual rather than legal, and increasingly a procurement gate	Surveillance audits on the certification cycle

Two rows in that table are worth stopping on, because a lot of published guidance gets both of them wrong.

Investment advisers have no business continuity rule. The SEC proposed one. Release IA-4439, File No. S7-13-16, RIN 3235-AL62, titled Adviser Business Continuity and Transition Plans, would have required every SEC-registered adviser to adopt a written business continuity and transition plan and would have amended Rule 204-2 to require keeping five years of them. Comments were due 6 September 2016. It was never adopted, and there is no section 275.206(4)-4 in the current Code of Federal Regulations. That does not make the plan optional in practice, because examination staff reach it through Rule 206(4)-7, but it does change what you are arguing about when a consultant tells you a specific element is mandatory. It is the same pattern as the adviser annual review written-documentation requirement, which was added in 2023 and then vacated in 2024, and which large amounts of live 2026 content still assert.

Under HIPAA, testing your contingency plan is Addressable, not Required. Read 45 CFR 164.308(a)(7)(ii) closely. Data backup plan, disaster recovery plan and emergency mode operation plan each carry the label Required. Testing and revision procedures and applications and data criticality analysis each carry the label Addressable. That inversion is counterintuitive, since an untested restore procedure is the single most common way a contingency plan fails, and it is a live source of argument in HIPAA risk analyses. The section's source credit reads [68 FR 8376, Feb. 20, 2003, as amended at 78 FR 5694, Jan. 25, 2013], so this text has not moved in over a decade. More on the wider standard sits on HIPAA compliance software.

§ 168 What is moving

The one change worth planning for, and why it keeps slipping

The HIPAA Security Rule overhaul published at 90 FR 898 on 6 January 2025 would rewrite the contingency plan standard more than anything else on this page. It proposes to remove the addressable category altogether, so testing would become mandatory. It proposes written procedures to restore critical electronic information systems and data within 72 hours, prioritized by criticality. And it proposes that a business associate notify the covered entity within 24 hours of activating its contingency plan, which is a contractual and operational change as much as a technical one.

As of September 2026 it is still a proposal. The regulatory agenda entry (RIN 0945-AA22) has slipped from a spring 2026 target to a 2027 one, and no final rule has published. A great deal of vendor content written in early 2025 describes the 72-hour restore requirement as if it were already in force. It is not. The current rule is the 2013 text. That gap between what is proposed and what binds is exactly the thing a static continuity plan cannot track, and it is what our regulatory change management monitoring is for: you get told when the proposal becomes a rule, with the date, not when a blog post guesses.

The practical read for a healthcare compliance officer today: the 72-hour objective is a sensible planning target and a reasonable thing to design toward, but do not let a vendor sell you a remediation project on the premise that you are currently non-compliant with it. You are not. You are ahead of a proposed rule, which is a different budget conversation.

§ 169 The market

Every business continuity vendor pricing page we opened on 2 September 2026

We ran the same first-hand check here that we run on every category we write about: open each vendor's own pricing URL and record what it returns. The result in this market is stranger than in privacy or GRC. Not one of ten vendors published a price. Seven URLs returned an error. The three that resolved all redirected permanently into a different company's website, because the vendor had been acquired.

Business continuity vendor pricing page status, checked 2 September 2026
Vendor pricing URL	Result on 2 Sep 2026	Why
castellanbc.com/pricing	301 redirect to riskonnect.com	Riskonnect acquired Castellan in July 2022
infiniteblue.com/pricing	301 redirect to everbridge.com	Everbridge acquired Infinite Blue, formerly BC in the Cloud, in July 2024
onsolve.com/pricing	301 redirect to crisis24.com	GardaWorld completed its acquisition of OnSolve in July 2024, folding it into Crisis24
fusionrm.com/pricing	404	No public pricing page. Majority stake bought by Great Hill Partners from Vista Equity in 2023
everbridge.com/pricing	404	Quote only
riskonnect.com/pricing	404	Quote only
archerirm.com/pricing	404	Quote only
quantivate.com/pricing	404	Quote only
preparis.com/pricing	404	Quote only
agilityrecovery.com/pricing	403	No public pricing page served

That consolidation matters more than the missing prices. If your shortlist came from a "top 10 business continuity software" article written before 2023, three of the names on it are now modules inside somebody else's platform, and the roadmap, support model and contract you are evaluating belong to the acquirer. Ask directly which entity you are contracting with, whether the product has a committed roadmap of its own, and what happens to your renewal if it gets merged into the parent suite. Those questions are free to ask and expensive to skip.

On the number itself, the only reliable public benchmarks come from aggregated contract data rather than from vendors. Everbridge shows a median annual contract around $21,493 with a recorded range of $9,734 to $69,374, which is roughly the shape of the general GRC market. Buyers of Fusion Risk Management report being told that three years is the minimum term on a new purchase, which is worth knowing before you budget a one-year pilot. Full working through of the sizing is on business continuity software pricing, and the wider vendor picture is on compliance software pricing.

§ 170 What we do

What Complianceofficer does for continuity, and what it does not

Being precise here saves everybody a wasted demo. Business continuity splits into two jobs that get sold as one product, and the two are bought by different people for different reasons.

The obligations job, which is ours

Every continuity obligation that applies to you, identified from the regimes you actually operate under, with the primary source cited next to it.
Each obligation mapped to a named owner and to the control that satisfies it, so an examiner question has an answer with a date attached.
The annual review and the material-change trigger tracked as dated events, not as a calendar reminder someone snoozes.
Alerts the day a rule moves, including proposals that have not yet bound, so you know the difference between planning ahead and being late.
Evidence retained in one register alongside the rest of your program, rather than in a separate resilience silo nobody in compliance can search.

The resilience operations job, which is not

Business impact analysis workshops, dependency mapping across processes, applications and third parties, and the maths behind recovery time and recovery point objectives.
Exercise and tabletop management, scenario libraries and after-action tracking.
Mass notification, on-call escalation and crisis communications during an actual event.
Automated failover, replication and backup orchestration, which is infrastructure tooling rather than either of the above.

If those are your bottleneck, buy a dedicated resilience suite. They are good at this and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Most mid-market regulated firms discover they have the first problem rather than the second. The plan exists. Somebody wrote it. What nobody can produce on demand is the proof that it was reviewed this year, the list of what changed since, and the mapping from each named regulatory element to the paragraph that satisfies it. That is an obligations register problem, and it lives naturally next to your policy management software and your vendor risk management software, because a continuity plan that ignores your critical third parties is not a plan.

§ 171 How it runs

How a continuity register gets built

Step 01
Scope the regimes

Tell us what you are and where you operate. A broker-dealer with a healthcare joint venture carries FINRA 4370 and the HIPAA contingency plan standard at once, and the two name different things.
Step 02
Pull the named elements

The ten FINRA elements, the five HIPAA specifications, the FFIEC examination themes. Each becomes a row with a source citation, not a paraphrase in a policy document.
Step 03
Assign and evidence

Every row gets an owner and a link to the plan section, test record or attestation that satisfies it. Gaps stay visible instead of being smoothed over in a summary.
Step 04
Watch and re-open

When a rule changes, the affected rows re-open with the change attached. That is what turns an annual review from an archaeology project into an hour of work.

§ 172 Who buys it

Who buys business continuity plan software, and what triggers it

Almost nobody buys this because they woke up worried about a hurricane. The trigger is nearly always a written question from outside the organization.

Broker-dealers and RIAs after an exam letter. FINRA asks for the plan, the annual review record and the emergency contact filing, and the review record is the one that is missing. See financial services compliance software.
Banks and credit unions preparing for an IT examination. The FFIEC booklet is written around resilience of the whole entity, so a plan that only covers the data center reads as thin. See bank compliance software.
Healthcare organizations and their business associates. A business associate agreement, a customer security review or an OCR risk analysis surfaces the contingency plan gap. See healthcare compliance software.
Anyone whose enterprise deal is blocked on a questionnaire. ISO 22301 and SOC 2 availability criteria both ask for continuity evidence, and the deal stalls until somebody produces it. See SOC 2 compliance software.
Groups with several legal entities. Continuity obligations do not consolidate: each regulated subsidiary carries its own, which is where a single shared spreadsheet stops working.

§ 173 Questions buyers ask

Questions buyers ask about business continuity plan software

What is business continuity plan software?

Business continuity plan software is the system of record for the plans, dependencies and test results an organization relies on to keep operating through a disruption. It replaces the Word document and the spreadsheet of phone numbers with a live inventory of critical processes, the systems and people each depends on, recovery objectives, and dated evidence that the plan was reviewed and exercised. In a regulated firm it also has to hold the proof, because the plan itself is examinable.

What is the difference between a business continuity plan and a disaster recovery plan?

A business continuity plan covers how the business keeps delivering its critical products and services during a disruption: people, premises, suppliers, communications and regulatory reporting. A disaster recovery plan is the narrower technical subset, covering how specific systems and data get restored. HIPAA illustrates the relationship exactly: at 45 CFR 164.308(a)(7) the disaster recovery plan is one of five implementation specifications sitting underneath a broader contingency plan standard.

What should a business continuity plan include?

If you are a FINRA member, Rule 4370(c) names ten elements the plan must address at a minimum: data back-up and recovery in hard copy and electronic form; all mission critical systems; financial and operational assessments; alternate communications between the firm and its customers; alternate communications between the firm and its employees; alternate physical location of employees; critical business constituent, bank and counter-party impact; regulatory reporting; communications with regulators; and how the firm will assure customers prompt access to their funds and securities if it cannot continue business. Everyone else can borrow that list, because it is far more concrete than most frameworks manage.

How much does business continuity software cost?

No major vendor publishes a rate. On 2 September 2026 we opened ten vendor pricing URLs in this category: seven returned a 404 or 403, and the three that resolved redirected into an acquirer's site. Aggregated contract data puts Everbridge at a median near $21,493 a year against a recorded range of $9,734 to $69,374. Buyers report a three-year minimum term at Fusion Risk Management. Budget implementation separately, because in this market it is quoted separately.

Is a business continuity plan legally required in the United States?

It depends entirely on what you are, and the answers genuinely differ. FINRA member firms must maintain a written plan under Rule 4370. HIPAA covered entities and business associates must have a contingency plan under 45 CFR 164.308(a)(7). Banks are examined against the FFIEC Business Continuity Management booklet. SEC-registered investment advisers have no dedicated rule at all, because the 2016 proposal was never adopted. A general commercial business with none of those exposures has no federal continuity mandate, only customer contracts and insurance conditions.

Does HIPAA require you to test your contingency plan?

Not today, strictly speaking. Under 45 CFR 164.308(a)(7)(ii) the data backup plan, disaster recovery plan and emergency mode operation plan are each Required, while testing and revision procedures and applications and data criticality analysis are each Addressable. Addressable means you assess whether it is reasonable and appropriate and document the decision, not that you can ignore it. The proposal published on 6 January 2025 would delete the addressable category, but as of September 2026 that is still a proposal.

How often should a business continuity plan be reviewed?

FINRA Rule 4370(b) requires an annual review of the plan and an update in the event of any material change. Annual review plus event-driven update is the pattern nearly every US regulator uses, so it is a safe default even where no rule names a frequency. The part teams get wrong is the material-change trigger: it fires when your own operations change, and it also fires when the rule underneath the plan changes, which is the half almost nobody monitors.

What is ISO 22301?

ISO 22301 is the international standard for a business continuity management system, and it is certifiable, which is why it appears in customer questionnaires and public tenders. It gives continuity the same management-system shape ISO 27001 gives information security. It is not a US legal requirement, and holding the certificate does not by itself satisfy FINRA 4370 or the HIPAA contingency plan standard, both of which name specific elements a generic management system will not automatically cover.

Do investment advisers need a business continuity plan?

In practice yes, but not because of a dedicated rule. The SEC proposed Rule 206(4)-4, Adviser Business Continuity and Transition Plans, in Release IA-4439, File No. S7-13-16, with comments due 6 September 2016. It was never adopted, and no section 275.206(4)-4 appears in the current Code of Federal Regulations. Examination staff still expect a plan and reach it through Rule 206(4)-7, which requires written policies and procedures reasonably designed to prevent violations of the Advisers Act.

What is the best business continuity management software?

The shortlist depends on which half of the problem is yours. If you need business impact analysis workflows, dependency mapping, exercise management and mass notification, the dedicated resilience suites do that far better than any compliance platform, and the serious names are Fusion Risk Management, Riskonnect, Everbridge and Archer. If your problem is proving that the obligations are identified, owned, evidenced and current, that is an obligations problem and belongs next to the rest of your compliance register. Note that three of the vendors on a typical shortlist have changed owner since 2022.

Do business continuity obligations apply per legal entity?

Generally yes, and this is where spreadsheets break. Each registered broker-dealer carries its own FINRA 4370 duty and files its own emergency contacts. Each covered entity carries its own HIPAA contingency plan standard. A shared group plan is fine as a source document, but the review evidence and the ownership have to be attributable per entity, which is the same structural problem described on multi-entity compliance software pricing.

§ 99 · Final entry

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