Business Continuity Management Policy and Procedures

[ AI providers MP, OSP, and AP] and AIC unless exempted.
1. Preparedness Planning: Establish comprehensive strategies to maintain essential functions during disruptions, with documented procedures for system restoration and function resumption with defined RTO and RPO.

2. Redundancy Implementation: Deploy backup systems, duplicated resources, and alternative processing pathways to prevent single-point vulnerabilities across the entire solution stack.

3. Collaborative Incident Response: Maintain clear communication channels and coordinated protocols for rapid joint action when unexpected challenges arise.

4. Regular Simulation Exercises: Conduct scheduled scenario-based readiness assessments to validate recovery procedures and identify improvement opportunities.

5. Continuous Enhancement: Implement feedback mechanisms to evolve resilience capabilities based on lessons from actual events and preparation activities.

6. Transparent Documentation: Maintain accessible records of architecture diagrams, dependency maps, and recovery instructions for all system components.

7. Shared Responsibility Matrix: Clearly define each party's accountability for maintaining operational stability throughout normal conditions and during exceptional circumstances.

8. Compliance Verification: Ensure all safeguards meet or exceed applicable industry standards and regulatory requirements for critical system protection.

9. Approval Process: Conduct initial technical assessment by subject matter experts(SMEs) for accuracy and completeness which should be then reviewed by cross-functional stakeholders for interdependency validation. Present final documentation to all stakeholders for formal endorsement

10. Communication: Distribute approved policies through multiple channels and briefing sessions with stakeholders and personnel with key roles. Create a shared terminology reference to ensure consistent understanding of terms and method for communication protocols for coordinated response.

11. Update: Schedule comprehensive review at minimum annually, while performing immediate assessment when there is architectural, system or dependency change. Updates should be associated with trigger events or review cycles and also need to be done when regulatory or compliance requirements dictate.

12. Change Management: Change control processes ensure that changes to the environment are carefully planned, reviewed, approved by Change Control Board, and implemented in a controlled manner. This helps prevent unauthorized or unintended changes that could disrupt service delivery or compromise security. Documentation of rollback procedures and post change validation.

1. Establishment and Documentation: Verify that formal Business Continuity Management (BCM) and operational resilience policies and procedures explicitly address continuity requirements related to AI, application services, and delivered products. For Model Providers (MP) specifically, confirm that the policy covers upkeep, supportability, versioning, and retraining of AI models, particularly where their availability or behavior directly impacts downstream systems or customers. Ensure policies document detailed roles, responsibilities, objectives, and scope, including dependencies on model behavior, compute environments, and model-serving infrastructure. Confirm the identification of upstream and downstream interfaces and dependencies, such as AI pipelines, orchestration layers, or inference endpoints, and how continuity risks at each point are managed.

2. Approval and Communication: Confirm that policies and procedures are approved by senior management or governing bodies and that evidence of formal endorsement (e.g., signatures, meeting minutes) is maintained. Verify the presence of a robust document control process for managing revisions, release control, and versioning to ensure the latest policy is always accessible. Ensure effective communication of continuity policies to internal and external stakeholders, including third-party vendors, with supporting materials such as training logs, stakeholder memos, and BCM awareness sessions.

3. Application and Implementation: Evaluate whether the policy is implemented in practice, including operational execution of 
responsibilities. For MPs, verify that continuity planning includes model retraining schedules, rollback strategies, failure isolation plans, and incident handling for model outages or data drift. Confirm clear role definitions for continuity, and validate that they are being actively fulfilled in AI service teams and operational support.

4. Evaluation and Maintenance: Verify that the BCM policy is reviewed at least annually or upon significant changes (e.g., new model deployments, cloud migrations, architectural changes). Confirm that triggers for reassessment, such as introduction of high-dependency AI models, changes in inference service SLAs, or new customer impact scenarios, are documented and linked to update logs. Ensure KPIs are tracked to measure effectiveness of continuity planning, including model uptime, failure recovery times, and retraining impact windows. Verify that lessons learned from incidents, tests, and audits are used to refine the BCM policy. Confirm that policies align with external standards and regulatory expectations (e.g., ISO 22301, industry resilience benchmarks), and are validated through internal or third-party reviews.

From CCM:
1. Examine policy and procedures for adequacy, approval, communication, and effectiveness as applicable to business continuity and resilience.
2. Examine policy and procedures for evidence of review at least annually.