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What is ISO 22301:2019?
ISO 22301 is the international standard for business continuity management, and builds on the success of British Standard BS 25999 and other regional standards. It’s designed to protect your business from potential disruption. This includes extreme weather, fire, flood, natural disaster, theft, IT outage, staff illness or terrorist attack. The ISO 22301 management system lets you identify threats relevant to your business and the critical business functions they could impact. And it allows you to put plans in place ahead of time to ensure your business doesn’t come to a standstill.
Key Point in ISO 22301
- Customer focus
- Leadership
- Engagement of people
- Process approach
- Improvement
- Evidence-based decision making
- Relationship management
ISO 22301 Benefits
Comply with legal requirements. There are more and more countries defining laws and regulations requiring business continuity compliance. And beyond government interests, private businesses (e.g., financial institutions) are also requiring their suppliers and partners to implement business continuity solutions. And the good news is that ISO 22301 provides a perfect framework and methodology to support compliance with these requirements – by reducing administrative and operational effort, as well as the number of penalties to be paid. Read the article Laws and regulations on information security and business continuity to see a list of business continuity legislation worldwide.
Achieve marketing advantage. If your company is ISO 22301 certified and your competitors aren’t, you will have an advantage over them when it comes to customers who are sensitive about keeping the continuity of their operations, and the delivery of their products and services. Additionally, such certification can help you get new customers, by making it easier to demonstrate that you are among the best in the industry, leading to increased market share and higher profits.
Reduce dependence on individuals. More often than not, a company’s critical activities rely on just a few people who are hard to replace – a situation painfully demonstrated when these people leave the organization. Executives who are aware of this can make use of business continuity practices to become far less dependent on those individuals (either because of implemented replacement solutions or by documenting related tasks), meaning you can prevent a lot of headache when someone leaves the organization.
Prevent large-scale damage. In a world of real-time services and transactions, every minute of down service costs money – a lot of money. And, even if your business is not so sensitive to small periods of unavailability, disruptive incidents will cost you. By implementing business continuity practices compliant with ISO 22301, you will have a sort of insurance policy. Whether by preventing disruptive incidents from happening, or by becoming capable of faster recovery – your company will save money. And, the best thing of all is that your investment in ISO 22301 is far smaller than the cost savings you’ll achieve.