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 a business from potential disruption.  This includes extreme weather, fire, flood, natural disaster, theft, IT outage, pandemic, staff illness, terrorist attack and other unplanned disruptive incidents. The ISO 22301 management system lets us identify threats relevant to our business and the critical business functions they could impact. And it allows us to put plans in place ahead of time to ensure our business doesn’t come to a standstill. 

​

No-one can predict the future with absolute certainty, but surely, we can plan our future for continuity reasons. Because of the difficulty associated with absolute prediction, it is of paramount importance that second option and Plan B is developed in order to minimize the threats of discontinuity. Mitigatory actions should be developed to minimize threats of disruptions and this is the essence of ISO 22301.

​

The business continuity management system emphasizes the importance of:

​

• understanding our needs and the necessity for establishing business continuity policies and objectives;

• operating and maintaining processes, capabilities and response structures to ensure we survive disruptions;

• monitoring and reviewing the performance and effectiveness of the business continuity management system;

• continual improvement based on qualitative and quantitative measures.

​

The same principles apply with ISO 22301 as with other management system standards and it forms a natural integration with other management system standards such as ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001. These principles include

​

• a policy

• management processes relating to planning, operations, review and improvement

• documented information

• operational control

• performance evaluation

• continual improvement

​

​