ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management
ISO 22301 is an internationally recognised standard that is designed to allow businesses to implement, maintain and improve a business continuity management system (BCMS). The ISO 22301 standard helps you understand and prioritise threats to your organisation. Its BCMS specifies the steps you need to take to reduce the threat of disruption, protect your assets if something does go wrong, and recover quickly from any incidents.
The standard is of particular interest to businesses looking to ensure their products and services can continue to be delivered at an acceptable capacity during a disruption.
The Benefits of ISO 22301
Here are some benefits of using the ISO 22301 framework:
- Minimising disruption: by following the international best practice strategy of ’Plan, Do, Check, Act’, ISO 22301 helps you minimise disruption and maintain your services
- Flexibility and responsiveness: by improving your crisis management techniques, ISO helps you deal quickly with any disruption, local or international, and rapidly restore services
- Accountability: by helping you define acceptable timescales for resuming business activities, the BCMS ensures your stakeholders know what level of service to expect following any disruption
- Competitive advantage: by strengthening management across your organisation, internationally recognised BCMS will increase client confidence in your services
- Continuous improvement: by submitting your Business Continuity Management System to regular audits and risk assessments, you’ll ensure it remains effective
- Regulatory compliance: by demonstrating that you comply with risk management laws regulations, you’ll increase the confidence of employees, customers and other stakeholders
- Save money: in some cases ISO 22301 can reduce internal and external BCMS audit costs, as well as insurance premiums, this could help your business improve its financial performance
- Optimise customer services: by strengthening management controls, you will be able maintain agreed levels of critical services and products to customers even if you face disruption
- Stronger management: by increasing management involvement and identifying internal external risks, the ISO 22301 framework ensures the effectiveness of your BCMS
- Brand reputation: by demonstrating your commitment to maintaining excellent service even in times of disruption, ISO 22301 certification can enhance your reputation with customers.