ISO 22301:2014

What is ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management?

ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) is the international standard for business continuity. It builds on the success of British Standard BS 25999 and other regional standards.

It’s designed to protect your business from disruption, including extreme weather, fire, flood, natural disaster, theft, IT outages, cyberattacks, staff illness, or terrorist attack.

The ISO 22301 management system lets you identify critical threats relevant to your business and the key business functions they could impact. It also allows you to put business continuity plans (BCPs) in place ahead of time to ensure your operations don’t come to a standstill.

What Constitutes a true business continuity management system (BCMS)?

BCMS is an organization’s capability to respond after a crisis within a predetermined response time. BCMS focuses not on how you prevented a crisis, but more importantly on what actions you take post-crisis.

Crisis scenarios may include people outage or unavailability, physical site disruptions, communication or technology failures, and vendor unavailability. Setting up an ISO 22301 BCMS involves:

Understanding business requirements for recovery in terms of Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
Making business continuity decisions on architecture, documentation, implementation, measurement, and audits.
Testing your business continuity plans (BCPs) regularly, because continuity is only as strong as its testing.

Organizations cannot always avoid disruptions, but without a business continuity plan this can impact operations, reputation, and profitability.

With an ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management system, the benefits are significant:

Minimize the impact of disruptive incidents.
Ensure rapid business recovery with minimal effect on performance.
Protect your brand reputation and gain a competitive edge.
Demonstrate compliance and resilience to customers and stakeholders.

Whether you’re new to ISO 22301 certification or looking to deepen your expertise, we offer ISO training courses, resources, and consultancy services tailored to your organization’s needs.