ISO 22301:2019 - Business Continuity Management System (BCMS)

ISO 22301" Societal security - Business continuity management systems - Requirements" is the international standard designed to help organisations identify potential threats to their business processes, and design a business continuity Management plan. The standard helps companies build effective backup systems and processes to safeguard against theft, natural disasters, disease outbreaks, terrorist attacks and other extraordinary incidents and to safeguard their interests of their stakeholders. The standard specifies the requirements for planning, implementing, monitoring, reviewing and improving an organisation's business continuity management system, with a view to reducing the operational impact of interruptions.

ISO 22301 is a management standard that can be fully integrated with other ISO standards, such as ISO 9001.

Why Business Continuity Management

ISO 22301 certification provides formal business continuity guidelines that will keep your organisation operational during and following a disruption. It seeks to minimise the impact to critical business functions, ensuring they are still capable of being delivered or recovered promptly. The purpose of the standard is to:

• Provide a consistent infrastructure, based on international best practices, to manage business continuity.
• Identify the possible impacts that threaten an organisation and provide a model for building resilience and the capacity to react effectively in order to safeguard the interests of the main stakeholders, and the reputation, brand and activities that generate added value.
• Proactively improve the ability to withstand incidents (resilience) that could interrupt critical activities on which the achievement of key objectives depends.
• Provide a proven method for restoring the ability to provide critical products and services to a predefined level and within a predetermined time, following an interruption.
• Provide an adequate response aimed at managing an interruption.
• Help provide a clear understanding of how the entire organisation works and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Provide an opportunity to reduce insurance premiums associated with business interruption.

The Benefits of ISO 22301 Certification

ISO 22301 certification consists in verifying the adequacy of the management system with particular reference to the following factors: means of identification of the phenomena that might impact on the business, analysis of the resulting risks in the impact assessment, definition of business monitoring and governance systems, development of plans and programmes aimed at minimising impacts, development of procedures for managing emergency situations. Business continuity management system certification helps organisations to:

• Consistent approach throughout the entire organization (for multi-site organisations) 
• Reduced costs and less impact on business performance if a disruptive incident occurs 
• Demonstration of your commitment to stakeholders such as customers, suppliers and regulators that your organization has sound systems and processes in place for business continuity
• Provide a consistent infrastructure, based on international best practices, to manage business continuity
• Provide an opportunity to reduce insurance premiums associated with business interruption.