Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education: A Step-by-Step Guide
Universities and colleges are more than places of learning - they’re small cities with thousands of students, faculty, and staff; massive IT systems; critical research operations; and residential communities that need protection. When disruption hits - whether it’s a cyberattack, a wildfire, or a pandemic - keeping these operations running is no small task.
That’s why business continuity planning (BCP) is essential in higher education. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) notes that more than 95% of crises are predictable, yet most institutions still rely on outdated spreadsheets or scattered plans to prepare. EDUCAUSE has also called institutional resilience one of higher education’s Top IT Issues for 2025, tying it directly to an institution’s ability to remain student-centered and mission-driven during disruption.
This guide walks through the essential steps of building a modern, effective business continuity plan for higher education - based on the latest guidance, tested best practices, and real-world examples from campuses using Kuali Ready.
The 7 Steps of Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education
Step 1: Define Business Continuity in Higher Ed
What it is: Business continuity planning (BCP) ensures that your institution can keep essential academic, research, and administrative functions running during and after a disruption.
Why it matters: A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership. FEMA’s Four Phases of Emergency Management - mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery - provide a helpful framework for understanding how BCP connects to emergency response and recovery efforts. Without clarity, teams confuse BCP with emergency response (saving lives in the moment) or IT disaster recovery (restoring systems). A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership.
Deliverables:
- A one-page statement defining BCP for your institution.
- A quick comparison table: BCP vs Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) vs IT Disaster Recovery (DR).
Quick Start Action: Draft and circulate a short definition of continuity planning across leadership teams to ensure everyone is working from the same baseline.
Step 2: Assess Risks and Identify Critical Functions
What it is: This is your foundation. A risk assessment identifies threats (wildfires, ransomware, pandemics), and a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) ranks the importance and time sensitivity of functions like payroll, housing, or your LMS. Guidance from Ready.gov’s Higher Education Emergency Operations Planning Guide emphasizes an “all-hazards” approach that ensures campuses prepare for both expected and unexpected disruptions.
Why it matters: You can’t plan for everything, but you can prioritize what matters most. RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) help set concrete targets.
Deliverables:
- Risk register of likely threats.
- BIA summary with prioritized functions, dependencies, RTO/RPO targets.
Quick Start Action: Pick one department (e.g., Registrar) and run a mini-BIA: list critical processes, dependencies, and maximum tolerable downtime.
Step 3: Establish Governance and Roles
What it is: Continuity planning fails if it’s owned by a single person. Governance means creating a cross-functional committee and assigning unit-level plan owners.
Why it matters: Clear ownership ensures accountability and spreads knowledge. It also builds buy-in across departments.
Deliverables:
- Continuity governance charter.
- RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) chart.
- List of plan owners in each unit.
Quick Start Action: Identify an executive sponsor (CIO, Provost, or VP of Admin) and form a small continuity planning committee to guide the program.
Step 4: Document Continuity Strategies and Playbooks
What it is: For each critical function, outline how it will continue if disrupted. This covers people, space, technology, and communication strategies.
Why it matters: Without documented strategies, staff default to improvisation - which slows recovery and increases risk. Playbooks provide step-by-step guidance when stress is high.
Deliverables:
- Continuity playbook for each critical function.
- Defined workarounds for systems, staff shortages, or facilities closures.
- Communication plan for stakeholders.
Quick Start Action: Create a playbook for your Learning Management System (LMS): if it goes down, who does what, what backup tools exist, and how faculty/students will be notified.
Step 5: Align Continuity with IT Disaster Recovery
What it is: This is where business priorities meet technical recovery. Continuity plans identify what needs to stay running; DR plans explain how IT will restore systems to meet those targets.
Why it matters: If IT restores non-critical systems first, academic operations may still grind to a halt. Aligning BCP with DR ensures technology supports institutional priorities.
In practice, many institutions discover a gap between what departments expect and what IT can deliver. For example, faculty may assume the Learning Management System (LMS) can be restored in 4 hours, but IT recovery processes might take 12 or more.
The chart below illustrates this common misalignment between target recovery times (RTOs) set by the business and actual IT recovery capabilities for key systems like the LMS, payroll, research data, and housing systems.
Deliverables:
- Dependency map linking critical functions to IT systems.
- Validated RTO/RPO targets with IT.
- Documented DR runbooks aligned with business priorities.
Quick Start Action: Sit down with IT leadership and map your top three critical business functions to the systems that support them. Compare desired recovery times with what IT can currently deliver.
Step 6: Train, Test, and Validate
What it is: Plans only work if tested. Exercises - tabletops, simulations, and partial failovers - help validate assumptions and uncover gaps.
Why it matters: FEMA and Ready.gov recommend institutions test continuity plans multiple times a year. Testing also strengthens staff confidence in the plan.
Deliverables:
- Annual exercise schedule.
- After-Action Reports (AARs) for each exercise.
- Improvement plan tracking fixes from past tests.
Quick Start Action: Run a 90-minute tabletop exercise simulating an LMS outage. Ask: Who gets notified? How do students access materials? What’s the workaround?
Step 7: Maintain and Improve
What it is: Continuity is not “set it and forget it.” Plans need updating with staff turnover, system changes, and emerging risks.
Why it matters: Outdated plans can be worse than no plan at all - because they create a false sense of security. Maintenance keeps continuity a living, reliable practice.
Deliverables:
- Annual review process.
- Version-controlled plans with audit logs.
- Key metrics dashboard (e.g., % of units with updated plans, recovery success rate).
Quick Start Action: Establish a recurring calendar reminder for each unit to review and update its continuity plan at least once a year - or immediately after any major disruption.
Step 8: Ensure Accessibility and Inclusion for Disabled Students, Faculty, and Staff
What it is: Continuity planning must account for the needs of disabled individuals across campus. This includes physical accessibility, technology access, and equitable communication during and after disruptions.
Why it matters: Students with disabilities make up nearly 20% of the higher education population in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics. If continuity strategies don’t address their needs, institutions risk not only compliance issues (ADA, Section 504, WCAG) but also widening equity gaps during crises.
Deliverables:
- An Accessibility Annex in your continuity plan that covers accommodations across academics, housing, facilities, and communications.
- Inclusive communication protocols that ensure all alerts, notifications, and instructions are accessible (captioned videos, TTY/TDD support, plain language options, screen reader compatibility).
- Redundancy plans for assistive technologies and support services, ensuring accommodations continue if systems or staff are disrupted.
- Collaboration with the Disability Services office and student advocacy groups during planning, testing, and reviews.
- Testing scenarios that explicitly include students and staff with accessibility needs.
Quick Start Action: Partner with your Disability Services office to run a tabletop exercise. Simulate a system outage or building closure and evaluate how accessible technologies, accommodations, and communications would hold up in real conditions.
Real-World Proof: Campuses Putting It Into Practice
Across higher education, institutions are showing how continuity planning strengthens resilience.
Boston University transformed its approach to continuity by adopting Kuali Ready, replacing a homegrown system that was difficult to maintain. With intuitive tools that staff could learn in just 20 minutes, BU empowered departments to manage their own plans. Today, three-quarters of its colleges and schools have continuity plans in place, helping the university safeguard academic and research operations across a large, complex campus.
At CSU Monterey Bay, many continuity plans had gone untouched for years. By implementing Kuali Ready, the university streamlined updates and created a campus-wide culture of engagement. A Continuity Advisory Group provided ongoing input, while automation and reporting tools simplified maintenance. Within two years, nearly 90% of plans were updated, and CSUMB shifted into “maintenance mode,” keeping continuity a living, collaborative practice.
Sacramento State faced the challenge of replacing an outdated, unsupported continuity plan. With Kuali Ready, the university built flexible and transparent plans tailored to its unique risks, from wildfires to river flooding. By involving faculty and staff across eight colleges, Sacramento State ensured accuracy and buy-in, creating continuity strategies that could scale across 53 academic programs while remaining easy to update and sustain.
These examples prove that continuity planning is achievable - and that the payoff is resilience when it matters most.
Download our Higher Education Business Continuity Planning Checklist to turn these steps into action. This practical template helps you track deliverables, assign ownership, and keep your continuity plans current across every department.
Ready to Build Resilience on Your Campus?
Disruption is inevitable. Chaos doesn’t have to be. By following these steps and making continuity planning a living practice, your institution can protect its mission, its people, and its future.
Kuali Ready was built for higher education - helping campuses move beyond static spreadsheets and outdated binders to create scalable, collaborative, and always-current continuity plans.
👉 Learn more about how Kuali Ready supports resilience in higher ed.
Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education: A Step-by-Step Guide
Universities and colleges are more than places of learning - they’re small cities with thousands of students, faculty, and staff; massive IT systems; critical research operations; and residential communities that need protection. When disruption hits - whether it’s a cyberattack, a wildfire, or a pandemic - keeping these operations running is no small task.
That’s why business continuity planning (BCP) is essential in higher education. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) notes that more than 95% of crises are predictable, yet most institutions still rely on outdated spreadsheets or scattered plans to prepare. EDUCAUSE has also called institutional resilience one of higher education’s Top IT Issues for 2025, tying it directly to an institution’s ability to remain student-centered and mission-driven during disruption.
This guide walks through the essential steps of building a modern, effective business continuity plan for higher education - based on the latest guidance, tested best practices, and real-world examples from campuses using Kuali Ready.
The 7 Steps of Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education
Step 1: Define Business Continuity in Higher Ed
What it is: Business continuity planning (BCP) ensures that your institution can keep essential academic, research, and administrative functions running during and after a disruption.
Why it matters: A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership. FEMA’s Four Phases of Emergency Management - mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery - provide a helpful framework for understanding how BCP connects to emergency response and recovery efforts. Without clarity, teams confuse BCP with emergency response (saving lives in the moment) or IT disaster recovery (restoring systems). A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership.
Deliverables:
- A one-page statement defining BCP for your institution.
- A quick comparison table: BCP vs Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) vs IT Disaster Recovery (DR).
Quick Start Action: Draft and circulate a short definition of continuity planning across leadership teams to ensure everyone is working from the same baseline.
Step 2: Assess Risks and Identify Critical Functions
What it is: This is your foundation. A risk assessment identifies threats (wildfires, ransomware, pandemics), and a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) ranks the importance and time sensitivity of functions like payroll, housing, or your LMS. Guidance from Ready.gov’s Higher Education Emergency Operations Planning Guide emphasizes an “all-hazards” approach that ensures campuses prepare for both expected and unexpected disruptions.
Why it matters: You can’t plan for everything, but you can prioritize what matters most. RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) help set concrete targets.
Deliverables:
- Risk register of likely threats.
- BIA summary with prioritized functions, dependencies, RTO/RPO targets.
Quick Start Action: Pick one department (e.g., Registrar) and run a mini-BIA: list critical processes, dependencies, and maximum tolerable downtime.
Step 3: Establish Governance and Roles
What it is: Continuity planning fails if it’s owned by a single person. Governance means creating a cross-functional committee and assigning unit-level plan owners.
Why it matters: Clear ownership ensures accountability and spreads knowledge. It also builds buy-in across departments.
Deliverables:
- Continuity governance charter.
- RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) chart.
- List of plan owners in each unit.
Quick Start Action: Identify an executive sponsor (CIO, Provost, or VP of Admin) and form a small continuity planning committee to guide the program.
Step 4: Document Continuity Strategies and Playbooks
What it is: For each critical function, outline how it will continue if disrupted. This covers people, space, technology, and communication strategies.
Why it matters: Without documented strategies, staff default to improvisation - which slows recovery and increases risk. Playbooks provide step-by-step guidance when stress is high.
Deliverables:
- Continuity playbook for each critical function.
- Defined workarounds for systems, staff shortages, or facilities closures.
- Communication plan for stakeholders.
Quick Start Action: Create a playbook for your Learning Management System (LMS): if it goes down, who does what, what backup tools exist, and how faculty/students will be notified.
Step 5: Align Continuity with IT Disaster Recovery
What it is: This is where business priorities meet technical recovery. Continuity plans identify what needs to stay running; DR plans explain how IT will restore systems to meet those targets.
Why it matters: If IT restores non-critical systems first, academic operations may still grind to a halt. Aligning BCP with DR ensures technology supports institutional priorities.
In practice, many institutions discover a gap between what departments expect and what IT can deliver. For example, faculty may assume the Learning Management System (LMS) can be restored in 4 hours, but IT recovery processes might take 12 or more.
The chart below illustrates this common misalignment between target recovery times (RTOs) set by the business and actual IT recovery capabilities for key systems like the LMS, payroll, research data, and housing systems.
Deliverables:
- Dependency map linking critical functions to IT systems.
- Validated RTO/RPO targets with IT.
- Documented DR runbooks aligned with business priorities.
Quick Start Action: Sit down with IT leadership and map your top three critical business functions to the systems that support them. Compare desired recovery times with what IT can currently deliver.
Step 6: Train, Test, and Validate
What it is: Plans only work if tested. Exercises - tabletops, simulations, and partial failovers - help validate assumptions and uncover gaps.
Why it matters: FEMA and Ready.gov recommend institutions test continuity plans multiple times a year. Testing also strengthens staff confidence in the plan.
Deliverables:
- Annual exercise schedule.
- After-Action Reports (AARs) for each exercise.
- Improvement plan tracking fixes from past tests.
Quick Start Action: Run a 90-minute tabletop exercise simulating an LMS outage. Ask: Who gets notified? How do students access materials? What’s the workaround?
Step 7: Maintain and Improve
What it is: Continuity is not “set it and forget it.” Plans need updating with staff turnover, system changes, and emerging risks.
Why it matters: Outdated plans can be worse than no plan at all - because they create a false sense of security. Maintenance keeps continuity a living, reliable practice.
Deliverables:
- Annual review process.
- Version-controlled plans with audit logs.
- Key metrics dashboard (e.g., % of units with updated plans, recovery success rate).
Quick Start Action: Establish a recurring calendar reminder for each unit to review and update its continuity plan at least once a year - or immediately after any major disruption.
Step 8: Ensure Accessibility and Inclusion for Disabled Students, Faculty, and Staff
What it is: Continuity planning must account for the needs of disabled individuals across campus. This includes physical accessibility, technology access, and equitable communication during and after disruptions.
Why it matters: Students with disabilities make up nearly 20% of the higher education population in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics. If continuity strategies don’t address their needs, institutions risk not only compliance issues (ADA, Section 504, WCAG) but also widening equity gaps during crises.
Deliverables:
- An Accessibility Annex in your continuity plan that covers accommodations across academics, housing, facilities, and communications.
- Inclusive communication protocols that ensure all alerts, notifications, and instructions are accessible (captioned videos, TTY/TDD support, plain language options, screen reader compatibility).
- Redundancy plans for assistive technologies and support services, ensuring accommodations continue if systems or staff are disrupted.
- Collaboration with the Disability Services office and student advocacy groups during planning, testing, and reviews.
- Testing scenarios that explicitly include students and staff with accessibility needs.
Quick Start Action: Partner with your Disability Services office to run a tabletop exercise. Simulate a system outage or building closure and evaluate how accessible technologies, accommodations, and communications would hold up in real conditions.
Real-World Proof: Campuses Putting It Into Practice
Across higher education, institutions are showing how continuity planning strengthens resilience.
Boston University transformed its approach to continuity by adopting Kuali Ready, replacing a homegrown system that was difficult to maintain. With intuitive tools that staff could learn in just 20 minutes, BU empowered departments to manage their own plans. Today, three-quarters of its colleges and schools have continuity plans in place, helping the university safeguard academic and research operations across a large, complex campus.
At CSU Monterey Bay, many continuity plans had gone untouched for years. By implementing Kuali Ready, the university streamlined updates and created a campus-wide culture of engagement. A Continuity Advisory Group provided ongoing input, while automation and reporting tools simplified maintenance. Within two years, nearly 90% of plans were updated, and CSUMB shifted into “maintenance mode,” keeping continuity a living, collaborative practice.
Sacramento State faced the challenge of replacing an outdated, unsupported continuity plan. With Kuali Ready, the university built flexible and transparent plans tailored to its unique risks, from wildfires to river flooding. By involving faculty and staff across eight colleges, Sacramento State ensured accuracy and buy-in, creating continuity strategies that could scale across 53 academic programs while remaining easy to update and sustain.
These examples prove that continuity planning is achievable - and that the payoff is resilience when it matters most.
Download our Higher Education Business Continuity Planning Checklist to turn these steps into action. This practical template helps you track deliverables, assign ownership, and keep your continuity plans current across every department.
Ready to Build Resilience on Your Campus?
Disruption is inevitable. Chaos doesn’t have to be. By following these steps and making continuity planning a living practice, your institution can protect its mission, its people, and its future.
Kuali Ready was built for higher education - helping campuses move beyond static spreadsheets and outdated binders to create scalable, collaborative, and always-current continuity plans.
👉 Learn more about how Kuali Ready supports resilience in higher ed.
Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education: A Step-by-Step Guide
Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education: A Step-by-Step Guide
Universities and colleges are more than places of learning - they’re small cities with thousands of students, faculty, and staff; massive IT systems; critical research operations; and residential communities that need protection. When disruption hits - whether it’s a cyberattack, a wildfire, or a pandemic - keeping these operations running is no small task.
That’s why business continuity planning (BCP) is essential in higher education. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) notes that more than 95% of crises are predictable, yet most institutions still rely on outdated spreadsheets or scattered plans to prepare. EDUCAUSE has also called institutional resilience one of higher education’s Top IT Issues for 2025, tying it directly to an institution’s ability to remain student-centered and mission-driven during disruption.
This guide walks through the essential steps of building a modern, effective business continuity plan for higher education - based on the latest guidance, tested best practices, and real-world examples from campuses using Kuali Ready.
The 7 Steps of Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education
Step 1: Define Business Continuity in Higher Ed
What it is: Business continuity planning (BCP) ensures that your institution can keep essential academic, research, and administrative functions running during and after a disruption.
Why it matters: A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership. FEMA’s Four Phases of Emergency Management - mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery - provide a helpful framework for understanding how BCP connects to emergency response and recovery efforts. Without clarity, teams confuse BCP with emergency response (saving lives in the moment) or IT disaster recovery (restoring systems). A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership.
Deliverables:
- A one-page statement defining BCP for your institution.
- A quick comparison table: BCP vs Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) vs IT Disaster Recovery (DR).
Quick Start Action: Draft and circulate a short definition of continuity planning across leadership teams to ensure everyone is working from the same baseline.
Step 2: Assess Risks and Identify Critical Functions
What it is: This is your foundation. A risk assessment identifies threats (wildfires, ransomware, pandemics), and a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) ranks the importance and time sensitivity of functions like payroll, housing, or your LMS. Guidance from Ready.gov’s Higher Education Emergency Operations Planning Guide emphasizes an “all-hazards” approach that ensures campuses prepare for both expected and unexpected disruptions.
Why it matters: You can’t plan for everything, but you can prioritize what matters most. RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) help set concrete targets.
Deliverables:
- Risk register of likely threats.
- BIA summary with prioritized functions, dependencies, RTO/RPO targets.
Quick Start Action: Pick one department (e.g., Registrar) and run a mini-BIA: list critical processes, dependencies, and maximum tolerable downtime.
Step 3: Establish Governance and Roles
What it is: Continuity planning fails if it’s owned by a single person. Governance means creating a cross-functional committee and assigning unit-level plan owners.
Why it matters: Clear ownership ensures accountability and spreads knowledge. It also builds buy-in across departments.
Deliverables:
- Continuity governance charter.
- RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) chart.
- List of plan owners in each unit.
Quick Start Action: Identify an executive sponsor (CIO, Provost, or VP of Admin) and form a small continuity planning committee to guide the program.
Step 4: Document Continuity Strategies and Playbooks
What it is: For each critical function, outline how it will continue if disrupted. This covers people, space, technology, and communication strategies.
Why it matters: Without documented strategies, staff default to improvisation - which slows recovery and increases risk. Playbooks provide step-by-step guidance when stress is high.
Deliverables:
- Continuity playbook for each critical function.
- Defined workarounds for systems, staff shortages, or facilities closures.
- Communication plan for stakeholders.
Quick Start Action: Create a playbook for your Learning Management System (LMS): if it goes down, who does what, what backup tools exist, and how faculty/students will be notified.
Step 5: Align Continuity with IT Disaster Recovery
What it is: This is where business priorities meet technical recovery. Continuity plans identify what needs to stay running; DR plans explain how IT will restore systems to meet those targets.
Why it matters: If IT restores non-critical systems first, academic operations may still grind to a halt. Aligning BCP with DR ensures technology supports institutional priorities.
In practice, many institutions discover a gap between what departments expect and what IT can deliver. For example, faculty may assume the Learning Management System (LMS) can be restored in 4 hours, but IT recovery processes might take 12 or more.
The chart below illustrates this common misalignment between target recovery times (RTOs) set by the business and actual IT recovery capabilities for key systems like the LMS, payroll, research data, and housing systems.
Deliverables:
- Dependency map linking critical functions to IT systems.
- Validated RTO/RPO targets with IT.
- Documented DR runbooks aligned with business priorities.
Quick Start Action: Sit down with IT leadership and map your top three critical business functions to the systems that support them. Compare desired recovery times with what IT can currently deliver.
Step 6: Train, Test, and Validate
What it is: Plans only work if tested. Exercises - tabletops, simulations, and partial failovers - help validate assumptions and uncover gaps.
Why it matters: FEMA and Ready.gov recommend institutions test continuity plans multiple times a year. Testing also strengthens staff confidence in the plan.
Deliverables:
- Annual exercise schedule.
- After-Action Reports (AARs) for each exercise.
- Improvement plan tracking fixes from past tests.
Quick Start Action: Run a 90-minute tabletop exercise simulating an LMS outage. Ask: Who gets notified? How do students access materials? What’s the workaround?
Step 7: Maintain and Improve
What it is: Continuity is not “set it and forget it.” Plans need updating with staff turnover, system changes, and emerging risks.
Why it matters: Outdated plans can be worse than no plan at all - because they create a false sense of security. Maintenance keeps continuity a living, reliable practice.
Deliverables:
- Annual review process.
- Version-controlled plans with audit logs.
- Key metrics dashboard (e.g., % of units with updated plans, recovery success rate).
Quick Start Action: Establish a recurring calendar reminder for each unit to review and update its continuity plan at least once a year - or immediately after any major disruption.
Step 8: Ensure Accessibility and Inclusion for Disabled Students, Faculty, and Staff
What it is: Continuity planning must account for the needs of disabled individuals across campus. This includes physical accessibility, technology access, and equitable communication during and after disruptions.
Why it matters: Students with disabilities make up nearly 20% of the higher education population in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics. If continuity strategies don’t address their needs, institutions risk not only compliance issues (ADA, Section 504, WCAG) but also widening equity gaps during crises.
Deliverables:
- An Accessibility Annex in your continuity plan that covers accommodations across academics, housing, facilities, and communications.
- Inclusive communication protocols that ensure all alerts, notifications, and instructions are accessible (captioned videos, TTY/TDD support, plain language options, screen reader compatibility).
- Redundancy plans for assistive technologies and support services, ensuring accommodations continue if systems or staff are disrupted.
- Collaboration with the Disability Services office and student advocacy groups during planning, testing, and reviews.
- Testing scenarios that explicitly include students and staff with accessibility needs.
Quick Start Action: Partner with your Disability Services office to run a tabletop exercise. Simulate a system outage or building closure and evaluate how accessible technologies, accommodations, and communications would hold up in real conditions.
Real-World Proof: Campuses Putting It Into Practice
Across higher education, institutions are showing how continuity planning strengthens resilience.
Boston University transformed its approach to continuity by adopting Kuali Ready, replacing a homegrown system that was difficult to maintain. With intuitive tools that staff could learn in just 20 minutes, BU empowered departments to manage their own plans. Today, three-quarters of its colleges and schools have continuity plans in place, helping the university safeguard academic and research operations across a large, complex campus.
At CSU Monterey Bay, many continuity plans had gone untouched for years. By implementing Kuali Ready, the university streamlined updates and created a campus-wide culture of engagement. A Continuity Advisory Group provided ongoing input, while automation and reporting tools simplified maintenance. Within two years, nearly 90% of plans were updated, and CSUMB shifted into “maintenance mode,” keeping continuity a living, collaborative practice.
Sacramento State faced the challenge of replacing an outdated, unsupported continuity plan. With Kuali Ready, the university built flexible and transparent plans tailored to its unique risks, from wildfires to river flooding. By involving faculty and staff across eight colleges, Sacramento State ensured accuracy and buy-in, creating continuity strategies that could scale across 53 academic programs while remaining easy to update and sustain.
These examples prove that continuity planning is achievable - and that the payoff is resilience when it matters most.
Download our Higher Education Business Continuity Planning Checklist to turn these steps into action. This practical template helps you track deliverables, assign ownership, and keep your continuity plans current across every department.
Ready to Build Resilience on Your Campus?
Disruption is inevitable. Chaos doesn’t have to be. By following these steps and making continuity planning a living practice, your institution can protect its mission, its people, and its future.
Kuali Ready was built for higher education - helping campuses move beyond static spreadsheets and outdated binders to create scalable, collaborative, and always-current continuity plans.
👉 Learn more about how Kuali Ready supports resilience in higher ed.
Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education: A Step-by-Step Guide
Universities and colleges are more than places of learning - they’re small cities with thousands of students, faculty, and staff; massive IT systems; critical research operations; and residential communities that need protection. When disruption hits - whether it’s a cyberattack, a wildfire, or a pandemic - keeping these operations running is no small task.
That’s why business continuity planning (BCP) is essential in higher education. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) notes that more than 95% of crises are predictable, yet most institutions still rely on outdated spreadsheets or scattered plans to prepare. EDUCAUSE has also called institutional resilience one of higher education’s Top IT Issues for 2025, tying it directly to an institution’s ability to remain student-centered and mission-driven during disruption.
This guide walks through the essential steps of building a modern, effective business continuity plan for higher education - based on the latest guidance, tested best practices, and real-world examples from campuses using Kuali Ready.
The 7 Steps of Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education
Step 1: Define Business Continuity in Higher Ed
What it is: Business continuity planning (BCP) ensures that your institution can keep essential academic, research, and administrative functions running during and after a disruption.
Why it matters: A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership. FEMA’s Four Phases of Emergency Management - mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery - provide a helpful framework for understanding how BCP connects to emergency response and recovery efforts. Without clarity, teams confuse BCP with emergency response (saving lives in the moment) or IT disaster recovery (restoring systems). A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership.
Deliverables:
- A one-page statement defining BCP for your institution.
- A quick comparison table: BCP vs Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) vs IT Disaster Recovery (DR).
Quick Start Action: Draft and circulate a short definition of continuity planning across leadership teams to ensure everyone is working from the same baseline.
Step 2: Assess Risks and Identify Critical Functions
What it is: This is your foundation. A risk assessment identifies threats (wildfires, ransomware, pandemics), and a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) ranks the importance and time sensitivity of functions like payroll, housing, or your LMS. Guidance from Ready.gov’s Higher Education Emergency Operations Planning Guide emphasizes an “all-hazards” approach that ensures campuses prepare for both expected and unexpected disruptions.
Why it matters: You can’t plan for everything, but you can prioritize what matters most. RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) help set concrete targets.
Deliverables:
- Risk register of likely threats.
- BIA summary with prioritized functions, dependencies, RTO/RPO targets.
Quick Start Action: Pick one department (e.g., Registrar) and run a mini-BIA: list critical processes, dependencies, and maximum tolerable downtime.
Step 3: Establish Governance and Roles
What it is: Continuity planning fails if it’s owned by a single person. Governance means creating a cross-functional committee and assigning unit-level plan owners.
Why it matters: Clear ownership ensures accountability and spreads knowledge. It also builds buy-in across departments.
Deliverables:
- Continuity governance charter.
- RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) chart.
- List of plan owners in each unit.
Quick Start Action: Identify an executive sponsor (CIO, Provost, or VP of Admin) and form a small continuity planning committee to guide the program.
Step 4: Document Continuity Strategies and Playbooks
What it is: For each critical function, outline how it will continue if disrupted. This covers people, space, technology, and communication strategies.
Why it matters: Without documented strategies, staff default to improvisation - which slows recovery and increases risk. Playbooks provide step-by-step guidance when stress is high.
Deliverables:
- Continuity playbook for each critical function.
- Defined workarounds for systems, staff shortages, or facilities closures.
- Communication plan for stakeholders.
Quick Start Action: Create a playbook for your Learning Management System (LMS): if it goes down, who does what, what backup tools exist, and how faculty/students will be notified.
Step 5: Align Continuity with IT Disaster Recovery
What it is: This is where business priorities meet technical recovery. Continuity plans identify what needs to stay running; DR plans explain how IT will restore systems to meet those targets.
Why it matters: If IT restores non-critical systems first, academic operations may still grind to a halt. Aligning BCP with DR ensures technology supports institutional priorities.
In practice, many institutions discover a gap between what departments expect and what IT can deliver. For example, faculty may assume the Learning Management System (LMS) can be restored in 4 hours, but IT recovery processes might take 12 or more.
The chart below illustrates this common misalignment between target recovery times (RTOs) set by the business and actual IT recovery capabilities for key systems like the LMS, payroll, research data, and housing systems.
Deliverables:
- Dependency map linking critical functions to IT systems.
- Validated RTO/RPO targets with IT.
- Documented DR runbooks aligned with business priorities.
Quick Start Action: Sit down with IT leadership and map your top three critical business functions to the systems that support them. Compare desired recovery times with what IT can currently deliver.
Step 6: Train, Test, and Validate
What it is: Plans only work if tested. Exercises - tabletops, simulations, and partial failovers - help validate assumptions and uncover gaps.
Why it matters: FEMA and Ready.gov recommend institutions test continuity plans multiple times a year. Testing also strengthens staff confidence in the plan.
Deliverables:
- Annual exercise schedule.
- After-Action Reports (AARs) for each exercise.
- Improvement plan tracking fixes from past tests.
Quick Start Action: Run a 90-minute tabletop exercise simulating an LMS outage. Ask: Who gets notified? How do students access materials? What’s the workaround?
Step 7: Maintain and Improve
What it is: Continuity is not “set it and forget it.” Plans need updating with staff turnover, system changes, and emerging risks.
Why it matters: Outdated plans can be worse than no plan at all - because they create a false sense of security. Maintenance keeps continuity a living, reliable practice.
Deliverables:
- Annual review process.
- Version-controlled plans with audit logs.
- Key metrics dashboard (e.g., % of units with updated plans, recovery success rate).
Quick Start Action: Establish a recurring calendar reminder for each unit to review and update its continuity plan at least once a year - or immediately after any major disruption.
Step 8: Ensure Accessibility and Inclusion for Disabled Students, Faculty, and Staff
What it is: Continuity planning must account for the needs of disabled individuals across campus. This includes physical accessibility, technology access, and equitable communication during and after disruptions.
Why it matters: Students with disabilities make up nearly 20% of the higher education population in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics. If continuity strategies don’t address their needs, institutions risk not only compliance issues (ADA, Section 504, WCAG) but also widening equity gaps during crises.
Deliverables:
- An Accessibility Annex in your continuity plan that covers accommodations across academics, housing, facilities, and communications.
- Inclusive communication protocols that ensure all alerts, notifications, and instructions are accessible (captioned videos, TTY/TDD support, plain language options, screen reader compatibility).
- Redundancy plans for assistive technologies and support services, ensuring accommodations continue if systems or staff are disrupted.
- Collaboration with the Disability Services office and student advocacy groups during planning, testing, and reviews.
- Testing scenarios that explicitly include students and staff with accessibility needs.
Quick Start Action: Partner with your Disability Services office to run a tabletop exercise. Simulate a system outage or building closure and evaluate how accessible technologies, accommodations, and communications would hold up in real conditions.
Real-World Proof: Campuses Putting It Into Practice
Across higher education, institutions are showing how continuity planning strengthens resilience.
Boston University transformed its approach to continuity by adopting Kuali Ready, replacing a homegrown system that was difficult to maintain. With intuitive tools that staff could learn in just 20 minutes, BU empowered departments to manage their own plans. Today, three-quarters of its colleges and schools have continuity plans in place, helping the university safeguard academic and research operations across a large, complex campus.
At CSU Monterey Bay, many continuity plans had gone untouched for years. By implementing Kuali Ready, the university streamlined updates and created a campus-wide culture of engagement. A Continuity Advisory Group provided ongoing input, while automation and reporting tools simplified maintenance. Within two years, nearly 90% of plans were updated, and CSUMB shifted into “maintenance mode,” keeping continuity a living, collaborative practice.
Sacramento State faced the challenge of replacing an outdated, unsupported continuity plan. With Kuali Ready, the university built flexible and transparent plans tailored to its unique risks, from wildfires to river flooding. By involving faculty and staff across eight colleges, Sacramento State ensured accuracy and buy-in, creating continuity strategies that could scale across 53 academic programs while remaining easy to update and sustain.
These examples prove that continuity planning is achievable - and that the payoff is resilience when it matters most.
Download our Higher Education Business Continuity Planning Checklist to turn these steps into action. This practical template helps you track deliverables, assign ownership, and keep your continuity plans current across every department.
Ready to Build Resilience on Your Campus?
Disruption is inevitable. Chaos doesn’t have to be. By following these steps and making continuity planning a living practice, your institution can protect its mission, its people, and its future.
Kuali Ready was built for higher education - helping campuses move beyond static spreadsheets and outdated binders to create scalable, collaborative, and always-current continuity plans.
👉 Learn more about how Kuali Ready supports resilience in higher ed.
Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education: A Step-by-Step Guide
Universities and colleges are more than places of learning - they’re small cities with thousands of students, faculty, and staff; massive IT systems; critical research operations; and residential communities that need protection. When disruption hits - whether it’s a cyberattack, a wildfire, or a pandemic - keeping these operations running is no small task.
That’s why business continuity planning (BCP) is essential in higher education. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) notes that more than 95% of crises are predictable, yet most institutions still rely on outdated spreadsheets or scattered plans to prepare. EDUCAUSE has also called institutional resilience one of higher education’s Top IT Issues for 2025, tying it directly to an institution’s ability to remain student-centered and mission-driven during disruption.
This guide walks through the essential steps of building a modern, effective business continuity plan for higher education - based on the latest guidance, tested best practices, and real-world examples from campuses using Kuali Ready.
The 7 Steps of Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education
Step 1: Define Business Continuity in Higher Ed
What it is: Business continuity planning (BCP) ensures that your institution can keep essential academic, research, and administrative functions running during and after a disruption.
Why it matters: A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership. FEMA’s Four Phases of Emergency Management - mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery - provide a helpful framework for understanding how BCP connects to emergency response and recovery efforts. Without clarity, teams confuse BCP with emergency response (saving lives in the moment) or IT disaster recovery (restoring systems). A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership.
Deliverables:
- A one-page statement defining BCP for your institution.
- A quick comparison table: BCP vs Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) vs IT Disaster Recovery (DR).
Quick Start Action: Draft and circulate a short definition of continuity planning across leadership teams to ensure everyone is working from the same baseline.
Step 2: Assess Risks and Identify Critical Functions
What it is: This is your foundation. A risk assessment identifies threats (wildfires, ransomware, pandemics), and a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) ranks the importance and time sensitivity of functions like payroll, housing, or your LMS. Guidance from Ready.gov’s Higher Education Emergency Operations Planning Guide emphasizes an “all-hazards” approach that ensures campuses prepare for both expected and unexpected disruptions.
Why it matters: You can’t plan for everything, but you can prioritize what matters most. RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) help set concrete targets.
Deliverables:
- Risk register of likely threats.
- BIA summary with prioritized functions, dependencies, RTO/RPO targets.
Quick Start Action: Pick one department (e.g., Registrar) and run a mini-BIA: list critical processes, dependencies, and maximum tolerable downtime.
Step 3: Establish Governance and Roles
What it is: Continuity planning fails if it’s owned by a single person. Governance means creating a cross-functional committee and assigning unit-level plan owners.
Why it matters: Clear ownership ensures accountability and spreads knowledge. It also builds buy-in across departments.
Deliverables:
- Continuity governance charter.
- RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) chart.
- List of plan owners in each unit.
Quick Start Action: Identify an executive sponsor (CIO, Provost, or VP of Admin) and form a small continuity planning committee to guide the program.
Step 4: Document Continuity Strategies and Playbooks
What it is: For each critical function, outline how it will continue if disrupted. This covers people, space, technology, and communication strategies.
Why it matters: Without documented strategies, staff default to improvisation - which slows recovery and increases risk. Playbooks provide step-by-step guidance when stress is high.
Deliverables:
- Continuity playbook for each critical function.
- Defined workarounds for systems, staff shortages, or facilities closures.
- Communication plan for stakeholders.
Quick Start Action: Create a playbook for your Learning Management System (LMS): if it goes down, who does what, what backup tools exist, and how faculty/students will be notified.
Step 5: Align Continuity with IT Disaster Recovery
What it is: This is where business priorities meet technical recovery. Continuity plans identify what needs to stay running; DR plans explain how IT will restore systems to meet those targets.
Why it matters: If IT restores non-critical systems first, academic operations may still grind to a halt. Aligning BCP with DR ensures technology supports institutional priorities.
In practice, many institutions discover a gap between what departments expect and what IT can deliver. For example, faculty may assume the Learning Management System (LMS) can be restored in 4 hours, but IT recovery processes might take 12 or more.
The chart below illustrates this common misalignment between target recovery times (RTOs) set by the business and actual IT recovery capabilities for key systems like the LMS, payroll, research data, and housing systems.
Deliverables:
- Dependency map linking critical functions to IT systems.
- Validated RTO/RPO targets with IT.
- Documented DR runbooks aligned with business priorities.
Quick Start Action: Sit down with IT leadership and map your top three critical business functions to the systems that support them. Compare desired recovery times with what IT can currently deliver.
Step 6: Train, Test, and Validate
What it is: Plans only work if tested. Exercises - tabletops, simulations, and partial failovers - help validate assumptions and uncover gaps.
Why it matters: FEMA and Ready.gov recommend institutions test continuity plans multiple times a year. Testing also strengthens staff confidence in the plan.
Deliverables:
- Annual exercise schedule.
- After-Action Reports (AARs) for each exercise.
- Improvement plan tracking fixes from past tests.
Quick Start Action: Run a 90-minute tabletop exercise simulating an LMS outage. Ask: Who gets notified? How do students access materials? What’s the workaround?
Step 7: Maintain and Improve
What it is: Continuity is not “set it and forget it.” Plans need updating with staff turnover, system changes, and emerging risks.
Why it matters: Outdated plans can be worse than no plan at all - because they create a false sense of security. Maintenance keeps continuity a living, reliable practice.
Deliverables:
- Annual review process.
- Version-controlled plans with audit logs.
- Key metrics dashboard (e.g., % of units with updated plans, recovery success rate).
Quick Start Action: Establish a recurring calendar reminder for each unit to review and update its continuity plan at least once a year - or immediately after any major disruption.
Step 8: Ensure Accessibility and Inclusion for Disabled Students, Faculty, and Staff
What it is: Continuity planning must account for the needs of disabled individuals across campus. This includes physical accessibility, technology access, and equitable communication during and after disruptions.
Why it matters: Students with disabilities make up nearly 20% of the higher education population in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics. If continuity strategies don’t address their needs, institutions risk not only compliance issues (ADA, Section 504, WCAG) but also widening equity gaps during crises.
Deliverables:
- An Accessibility Annex in your continuity plan that covers accommodations across academics, housing, facilities, and communications.
- Inclusive communication protocols that ensure all alerts, notifications, and instructions are accessible (captioned videos, TTY/TDD support, plain language options, screen reader compatibility).
- Redundancy plans for assistive technologies and support services, ensuring accommodations continue if systems or staff are disrupted.
- Collaboration with the Disability Services office and student advocacy groups during planning, testing, and reviews.
- Testing scenarios that explicitly include students and staff with accessibility needs.
Quick Start Action: Partner with your Disability Services office to run a tabletop exercise. Simulate a system outage or building closure and evaluate how accessible technologies, accommodations, and communications would hold up in real conditions.
Real-World Proof: Campuses Putting It Into Practice
Across higher education, institutions are showing how continuity planning strengthens resilience.
Boston University transformed its approach to continuity by adopting Kuali Ready, replacing a homegrown system that was difficult to maintain. With intuitive tools that staff could learn in just 20 minutes, BU empowered departments to manage their own plans. Today, three-quarters of its colleges and schools have continuity plans in place, helping the university safeguard academic and research operations across a large, complex campus.
At CSU Monterey Bay, many continuity plans had gone untouched for years. By implementing Kuali Ready, the university streamlined updates and created a campus-wide culture of engagement. A Continuity Advisory Group provided ongoing input, while automation and reporting tools simplified maintenance. Within two years, nearly 90% of plans were updated, and CSUMB shifted into “maintenance mode,” keeping continuity a living, collaborative practice.
Sacramento State faced the challenge of replacing an outdated, unsupported continuity plan. With Kuali Ready, the university built flexible and transparent plans tailored to its unique risks, from wildfires to river flooding. By involving faculty and staff across eight colleges, Sacramento State ensured accuracy and buy-in, creating continuity strategies that could scale across 53 academic programs while remaining easy to update and sustain.
These examples prove that continuity planning is achievable - and that the payoff is resilience when it matters most.
Download our Higher Education Business Continuity Planning Checklist to turn these steps into action. This practical template helps you track deliverables, assign ownership, and keep your continuity plans current across every department.
Ready to Build Resilience on Your Campus?
Disruption is inevitable. Chaos doesn’t have to be. By following these steps and making continuity planning a living practice, your institution can protect its mission, its people, and its future.
Kuali Ready was built for higher education - helping campuses move beyond static spreadsheets and outdated binders to create scalable, collaborative, and always-current continuity plans.
👉 Learn more about how Kuali Ready supports resilience in higher ed.
Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education: A Step-by-Step Guide
Universities and colleges are more than places of learning - they’re small cities with thousands of students, faculty, and staff; massive IT systems; critical research operations; and residential communities that need protection. When disruption hits - whether it’s a cyberattack, a wildfire, or a pandemic - keeping these operations running is no small task.
That’s why business continuity planning (BCP) is essential in higher education. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) notes that more than 95% of crises are predictable, yet most institutions still rely on outdated spreadsheets or scattered plans to prepare. EDUCAUSE has also called institutional resilience one of higher education’s Top IT Issues for 2025, tying it directly to an institution’s ability to remain student-centered and mission-driven during disruption.
This guide walks through the essential steps of building a modern, effective business continuity plan for higher education - based on the latest guidance, tested best practices, and real-world examples from campuses using Kuali Ready.
The 7 Steps of Business Continuity Planning in Higher Education
Step 1: Define Business Continuity in Higher Ed
What it is: Business continuity planning (BCP) ensures that your institution can keep essential academic, research, and administrative functions running during and after a disruption.
Why it matters: A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership. FEMA’s Four Phases of Emergency Management - mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery - provide a helpful framework for understanding how BCP connects to emergency response and recovery efforts. Without clarity, teams confuse BCP with emergency response (saving lives in the moment) or IT disaster recovery (restoring systems). A shared definition helps set expectations and align leadership.
Deliverables:
- A one-page statement defining BCP for your institution.
- A quick comparison table: BCP vs Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) vs IT Disaster Recovery (DR).
Quick Start Action: Draft and circulate a short definition of continuity planning across leadership teams to ensure everyone is working from the same baseline.
Step 2: Assess Risks and Identify Critical Functions
What it is: This is your foundation. A risk assessment identifies threats (wildfires, ransomware, pandemics), and a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) ranks the importance and time sensitivity of functions like payroll, housing, or your LMS. Guidance from Ready.gov’s Higher Education Emergency Operations Planning Guide emphasizes an “all-hazards” approach that ensures campuses prepare for both expected and unexpected disruptions.
Why it matters: You can’t plan for everything, but you can prioritize what matters most. RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) help set concrete targets.
Deliverables:
- Risk register of likely threats.
- BIA summary with prioritized functions, dependencies, RTO/RPO targets.
Quick Start Action: Pick one department (e.g., Registrar) and run a mini-BIA: list critical processes, dependencies, and maximum tolerable downtime.
Step 3: Establish Governance and Roles
What it is: Continuity planning fails if it’s owned by a single person. Governance means creating a cross-functional committee and assigning unit-level plan owners.
Why it matters: Clear ownership ensures accountability and spreads knowledge. It also builds buy-in across departments.
Deliverables:
- Continuity governance charter.
- RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) chart.
- List of plan owners in each unit.
Quick Start Action: Identify an executive sponsor (CIO, Provost, or VP of Admin) and form a small continuity planning committee to guide the program.
Step 4: Document Continuity Strategies and Playbooks
What it is: For each critical function, outline how it will continue if disrupted. This covers people, space, technology, and communication strategies.
Why it matters: Without documented strategies, staff default to improvisation - which slows recovery and increases risk. Playbooks provide step-by-step guidance when stress is high.
Deliverables:
- Continuity playbook for each critical function.
- Defined workarounds for systems, staff shortages, or facilities closures.
- Communication plan for stakeholders.
Quick Start Action: Create a playbook for your Learning Management System (LMS): if it goes down, who does what, what backup tools exist, and how faculty/students will be notified.
Step 5: Align Continuity with IT Disaster Recovery
What it is: This is where business priorities meet technical recovery. Continuity plans identify what needs to stay running; DR plans explain how IT will restore systems to meet those targets.
Why it matters: If IT restores non-critical systems first, academic operations may still grind to a halt. Aligning BCP with DR ensures technology supports institutional priorities.
In practice, many institutions discover a gap between what departments expect and what IT can deliver. For example, faculty may assume the Learning Management System (LMS) can be restored in 4 hours, but IT recovery processes might take 12 or more.
The chart below illustrates this common misalignment between target recovery times (RTOs) set by the business and actual IT recovery capabilities for key systems like the LMS, payroll, research data, and housing systems.
Deliverables:
- Dependency map linking critical functions to IT systems.
- Validated RTO/RPO targets with IT.
- Documented DR runbooks aligned with business priorities.
Quick Start Action: Sit down with IT leadership and map your top three critical business functions to the systems that support them. Compare desired recovery times with what IT can currently deliver.
Step 6: Train, Test, and Validate
What it is: Plans only work if tested. Exercises - tabletops, simulations, and partial failovers - help validate assumptions and uncover gaps.
Why it matters: FEMA and Ready.gov recommend institutions test continuity plans multiple times a year. Testing also strengthens staff confidence in the plan.
Deliverables:
- Annual exercise schedule.
- After-Action Reports (AARs) for each exercise.
- Improvement plan tracking fixes from past tests.
Quick Start Action: Run a 90-minute tabletop exercise simulating an LMS outage. Ask: Who gets notified? How do students access materials? What’s the workaround?
Step 7: Maintain and Improve
What it is: Continuity is not “set it and forget it.” Plans need updating with staff turnover, system changes, and emerging risks.
Why it matters: Outdated plans can be worse than no plan at all - because they create a false sense of security. Maintenance keeps continuity a living, reliable practice.
Deliverables:
- Annual review process.
- Version-controlled plans with audit logs.
- Key metrics dashboard (e.g., % of units with updated plans, recovery success rate).
Quick Start Action: Establish a recurring calendar reminder for each unit to review and update its continuity plan at least once a year - or immediately after any major disruption.
Step 8: Ensure Accessibility and Inclusion for Disabled Students, Faculty, and Staff
What it is: Continuity planning must account for the needs of disabled individuals across campus. This includes physical accessibility, technology access, and equitable communication during and after disruptions.
Why it matters: Students with disabilities make up nearly 20% of the higher education population in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics. If continuity strategies don’t address their needs, institutions risk not only compliance issues (ADA, Section 504, WCAG) but also widening equity gaps during crises.
Deliverables:
- An Accessibility Annex in your continuity plan that covers accommodations across academics, housing, facilities, and communications.
- Inclusive communication protocols that ensure all alerts, notifications, and instructions are accessible (captioned videos, TTY/TDD support, plain language options, screen reader compatibility).
- Redundancy plans for assistive technologies and support services, ensuring accommodations continue if systems or staff are disrupted.
- Collaboration with the Disability Services office and student advocacy groups during planning, testing, and reviews.
- Testing scenarios that explicitly include students and staff with accessibility needs.
Quick Start Action: Partner with your Disability Services office to run a tabletop exercise. Simulate a system outage or building closure and evaluate how accessible technologies, accommodations, and communications would hold up in real conditions.
Real-World Proof: Campuses Putting It Into Practice
Across higher education, institutions are showing how continuity planning strengthens resilience.
Boston University transformed its approach to continuity by adopting Kuali Ready, replacing a homegrown system that was difficult to maintain. With intuitive tools that staff could learn in just 20 minutes, BU empowered departments to manage their own plans. Today, three-quarters of its colleges and schools have continuity plans in place, helping the university safeguard academic and research operations across a large, complex campus.
At CSU Monterey Bay, many continuity plans had gone untouched for years. By implementing Kuali Ready, the university streamlined updates and created a campus-wide culture of engagement. A Continuity Advisory Group provided ongoing input, while automation and reporting tools simplified maintenance. Within two years, nearly 90% of plans were updated, and CSUMB shifted into “maintenance mode,” keeping continuity a living, collaborative practice.
Sacramento State faced the challenge of replacing an outdated, unsupported continuity plan. With Kuali Ready, the university built flexible and transparent plans tailored to its unique risks, from wildfires to river flooding. By involving faculty and staff across eight colleges, Sacramento State ensured accuracy and buy-in, creating continuity strategies that could scale across 53 academic programs while remaining easy to update and sustain.
These examples prove that continuity planning is achievable - and that the payoff is resilience when it matters most.
Download our Higher Education Business Continuity Planning Checklist to turn these steps into action. This practical template helps you track deliverables, assign ownership, and keep your continuity plans current across every department.
Ready to Build Resilience on Your Campus?
Disruption is inevitable. Chaos doesn’t have to be. By following these steps and making continuity planning a living practice, your institution can protect its mission, its people, and its future.
Kuali Ready was built for higher education - helping campuses move beyond static spreadsheets and outdated binders to create scalable, collaborative, and always-current continuity plans.
👉 Learn more about how Kuali Ready supports resilience in higher ed.