ISO 22301:2019 – Business Continuity Plan

What is ISO 22301?

ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management is a set of standards used to manage an organization’s risk when it comes to disruptions in its ability to provide products or services. These standards were created by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and they are designed to help organizations prepare, respond, recover from, and anticipate potential risks.

This includes preventing, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disruptions to keep the organization functioning. It covers every aspect of an organization’s operations, including employees, assets, and supply chains. Significant topics include risk assessment, business impact analysis (BIA), emergency preparedness plans (EPPs), and recovery strategies.

One of the key benefits of ISO 22301 is that it can help organizations improve their overall resilience. Resilience is the ability of an organization to withstand disruptions and continue to operate effectively. By implementing the standards set out in ISO 22301, businesses can become more resilient and better prepared for any potential disruptions.

Why is Business Continuity Important for you?

Business continuity is a term used in all industries to describe the process for dealing with emergencies. Business continuity aims to ensure that companies can continue operating after a disaster or other event and resume normal operations as soon as possible.
When a disaster or emergency occurs, it is critical that your company can continue to operate. In some cases, you may not be able to resume normal operations right away. However, if you have a plan in place and your team members are adequately trained on their roles, you will minimize the impact of the event on your business.

The Requirements for ISO 22301

ISO 22301 is the international standard for disaster management. The goal of ISO 22301 is to ensure that all organizations can manage risk and prepare for, prevent, respond to, and efficiently recover from disasters with minimal damage.

The requirements of this standard are broken into nine chapters: Organization Management; Risk Identification; Risk Analysis; Risk Evaluation against Objectives; Resilience Planning; Emergency Response Operations (EROs); Continuity Management (CM); Recovery Operation (ROs); Training Programs.

Four Phases of a Business Continuity Plan

• Continuity: Continuity is one of the essential features that any organization should be looking for in their business continuity management. Continuity ensures that an organization can recover from a disaster and provide goods or services without interruption. The ISO 22301 standard outlines the requirements for continuity defined by four components: organizational, people, information systems, and environment. By ensuring that each of these components is in place and functioning, an organization can have confidence in its continuity management program.
• Management Responsibility: Management responsibility is establishing and maintaining a management system to meet the requirements of ISO 22301. It includes:

1. Establishing and implementing policies, processes, and procedures for risk assessment, risk treatment, and continual improvement.
2. Implementing operational controls to mitigate risks identified in risk assessments.
3. Developing strategies for continual improvement of management system performance.
4. Monitoring and measuring management system performance.
5. Reporting on the status of the management system to senior management.

Management responsibility is a critical element of an effective ISO 22301 management system. It helps ensure that risks are identified and managed and that the continual improvement of the management system is achieved.

• Resource Management: Resource management includes:

1. Planning and implementing activities to maintain or restore resources to meet operational requirements.
2. Monitoring and evaluating performance against those requirements concerning those resources.
3. Identifying problems that may affect the availability of those resources as well as their use and performance.
4. Taking corrective actions to maintain or restore the availability and use to meet operational requirements.

Resource management is a crucial aspect of business continuity, which aims at ensuring the continuing functioning of an organization’s critical functions in situations where regular activities are interrupted or impaired by disruptive events such as natural disasters.

• Measure, Analyze, and Improve Performance: The ISO 22301 standard is a risk management system that helps businesses identify and manage risks. The three main components of the ISO 22301 are measurement, analysis, and improvement.

1. To measure the performance of your risk management system, you will need to define what success looks like.
2. Once you have defined success, you must establish indicators that help you measure how well or poorly your business is achieving this goal.
3. You can then analyze these indicators to determine trends in performance over time so that changes can be made if necessary.
4. Finally, it’s essential to improve on areas where there is room for improvement and monitor progress towards meeting targets – both current and future ones!

This is how you measure, analyze, and improve the performance of a risk management system. It’s a necessary process to ensure your company remains compliant and protects its assets.

Steps to Creating a Business Continuity Plan

• Get Organized: The first step in developing your business continuity plan is to know what resources are available to you and who would need them if there was a disaster or disruption of service at your company. You’ll want to do some research on the types of disasters that could happen near you and how they might affect your business so that you can address them specifically in your plan later on.
• Identify Your Risks: Once you have an idea about what disasters or disruptions could occur, you’ll want to start assessing your risks. This includes looking at both the likelihood of an event happening and the potential impact on your business if it did.
• Recovery Strategies: Business continuity plans are essential for all businesses. A business continuity plan aims to have an up-to-date document that can be used in the event of a disaster or outage. Disaster recovery strategies typically include the following: backup and restore, rollback, fault tolerance (e.g., RAID), power distribution unit (PDU) shutdowns, server cluster shutdowns, database replication solutions.One of the most important aspects of a disaster recovery plan is to have a process to restore data. This may involve having backups of your data that can be fixed in the event of a disaster.
• Test, Test Again, and Make Improvements: A business continuity plan is a set of procedures designed to ensure that an organization’s essential functions can continue in case of an emergency. Organizations often use large amounts of data, equipment, or other resources. A business continuity plan may also be called a disaster recovery plan or contingency plan.

Business Continuity Plans typically have three components:

1. An assessment phase where they identify their risks and vulnerabilities to disasters.
2. A planning phase where they develop strategies for overcoming these risks and vulnerabilities.
3. And finally, the implementation phase includes testing, training employees on what to do in case disaster strikes.

Benefits of The Business Continuity Plan:

A business continuity plan is a set of procedures that you follow in an emergency, disruption, or disaster. It helps to ensure that your company can continue operating even if there are events outside your control. Here are five benefits that having these plans in place can provide for your organization:

1. The ability to restore critical systems and data quickly after the disaster has occurred.
2. Protection against lawsuits arising from temporary shutdowns caused by disasters or disruptions.
3. Reduced downtime for employees who may be unable to get back into work due to transportation issues, power outages, etc.
4. Less time lost during recovery efforts because all necessary contact information will be available when it’s needed most.
5. Improved customer service and satisfaction due to having a robust continuity plan in place.