A business continuity plan (BCP) is the organizational answer to “what do we do while the primary system is down,” as distinct from disaster recovery, which is the technical answer to “how do we get the primary system back.” For a company whose DAM feeds live product pages, syndicated marketplace listings, or an active ad campaign, the two are tightly linked: the BCP has to specify how imagery keeps flowing to customer-facing channels for the hours or days it takes to restore the DAM itself.<\/p>
ISO 22301:2019 is the international standard for business continuity management systems. It defines business continuity as an organization’s capacity to keep delivering products and services, at a predefined capacity, within acceptable timeframes, during a disruption \u2014 and it requires the plan to be tested and improved, not just documented. Enterprise DAM buyers in regulated or high-revenue-risk industries increasingly ask vendors whether their own continuity practices are ISO 22301-aligned, and separately need their own internal plan for the case where the vendor itself is the point of failure.<\/p>
In practice, a DAM-relevant BCP names specific fallbacks: which renditions are cached at the CDN edge and will keep serving even if the origin DAM is unreachable, which small set of business-critical assets (current-season product shots, active campaign creative) are kept in a manually maintained backup location outside the DAM, and who has authority to redirect systems to that fallback without waiting for a change-approval process that assumes normal operating conditions.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A documented plan for keeping critical operations \u2014 including access to the DAM and its assets \u2014 running during and after a disruption such as an outage, cyberattack, or natural disaster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","faq":[{"question":"How is a business continuity plan different from disaster recovery?","answer":"A BCP is the organizational answer to \"what do we do while the primary system is down\"; disaster recovery is the technical answer to \"how do we get the primary system back.\""},{"question":"What does ISO 22301 require of a business continuity plan?","answer":"It defines business continuity as the capacity to keep delivering products and services, at a predefined capacity, within acceptable timeframes during a disruption, and requires the plan to be tested and improved, not just documented."},{"question":"What kind of DAM outage does a BCP treat as a continuity event?","answer":"A DAM outage during a live e-commerce launch or active campaign, which stalls customer-facing operations rather than being just an IT ticket."},{"question":"What fallbacks might a DAM-relevant BCP specify?","answer":"Which renditions are cached at the CDN edge to keep serving if the origin DAM is down, and which business-critical assets are kept in a manually maintained backup location outside the DAM."},{"question":"What's the most common failure with business continuity plans?","answer":"They're written once to satisfy an audit or procurement checklist and never rehearsed, so nobody actually knows the manual steps when an incident hits."},{"question":"Who should have authority to activate a BCP's fallback during an incident?","answer":"Someone specifically named in the plan with authority to redirect systems to the fallback without waiting for a change-approval process built for normal conditions."}],"checked_date":"2026-08-07","sources":[{"statement":"ISO 22301:2019 is the international standard for business continuity management systems (BCMS), defining requirements for organizations to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptive incidents.","source_name":"ISO","url":"https:\/\/www.iso.org\/standard\/75106.html","checked":"2026-08-07"}],"kicker":"","fact_checker":0,"reading_time":0,"revisions":[],"seo_title":"","seo_description":"","noindex":false,"related":[2417,2492,2548,2585,2578,2550],"definition":"A documented plan for keeping critical operations \u2014 including access to the DAM and its assets \u2014 running during and after a disruption such as an outage, cyberattack, or natural disaster.","why":"Companies whose e-commerce, publishing, or campaign operations depend on the DAM to serve live imagery treat a DAM outage during a launch as a business continuity event, not an IT ticket. A business continuity plan forces the organization to name a fallback for asset delivery \u2014 a CDN cache, a local mirror, a pre-exported package of critical assets \u2014 before an incident, instead of improvising while a product launch is stalled. ISO 22301 is the reference standard most enterprises use to structure and audit such plans.","example_rows":[{"field":"Trigger","values":"DAM vendor outage, ransomware incident, cloud region failure"},{"field":"Fallback","values":"CDN-cached renditions keep serving live pages; local export mirror covers critical brand assets"},{"field":"Recovery priority","values":"Live e-commerce and active-campaign imagery restored before archival assets"}],"mistake":"Plans get written once to satisfy an audit or enterprise procurement checklist and are never rehearsed, so when an incident hits, nobody actually knows the manual steps to swap a broken DAM link for the static fallback.","deep_link":""},"silo":[24],"class_list":["post-2576","glossary","type-glossary","status-publish","hentry","silo-glossary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/2576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/glossary"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/2576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3544,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/2576\/revisions\/3544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"silo","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/silo?post=2576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}