For those who don’t already know, ISO 22301:2019 is an international standard for business continuity management. This standard seeks to provide a better framework for managing an organization.
This ISO standard is designed to help organizations implement, maintain, and improve a management system to prevent and reduce accidents (risks, for example) that may occur in organizations.
The most recent revision of ISO 22301 was released on October 31, 2019. This version seeks to detail requirements for a management system to protect and reduce untoward incidents in your business. As well as, should something occur, ensure that the company will be prepared to recover.
So, in this article, we will learn more about this standard, its objectives, and what the advantages of implementing ISO 22301 in your organization are. Shall we?
Knowing more about the objective of ISO 22301:2019 – Business Continuity Management Systems
ISO 22301 – Business continuity management systems – is an international standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO – International Organization for Standardization) and developed by important specialists, from all over the world, in business continuity.
This standard seeks to provide a framework in which decision makers can correctly describe how to manage business continuity in an organization. This type of framework aims to protect the organization from possible threats and downtime in its production system, and seeks to make the management of systems more effective by ensuring the continued delivery of products and services after disruptions occur.
The first version of this standard was released in 2012 and its latest revision was published in October 2019, with no major changes occurring in its main concept. But with this update, the standard features fewer prescriptions and more flexibility, and it is then possible to add more value to organizations.
ISO 22301:2019 seeks to provide a framework for planning, testing, and monitoring a business continuity management system. It has as one of its main objectives to help organizations that aim to demonstrate to stakeholders that, in the case of adverse events occurring, they can quickly turn around the situation and provide an effective service, ensuring the delivery of contracted products or services.
This norm also allows the company to act in a preventive way when identifying risks, aiming at continuity strategies for the company’s quick recovery in case of incidents. One of the main objectives of this norm is, then, to protect the business from possible interruptions.
These interruptions or incidents can be understood as any event that can make work impossible, such as accidents, employee absences, damage to the company’s structure, system failures, natural disasters, among others.
What are the benefits of ISO 22301?
The implementation of this standard can present many benefits for any type of company in which it is applied, so we will list some important ones that make a difference in the day to day of the organization. Through this norm, it is possible to
- Identify and manage possible threats to your company’s management system;
- Comply with the relevant legal requirements;
- Improve the company’s reputation and image in the market;
- Increase the organization’s ability to recover in crisis situations;
- Maintain services without interruption during negative occurrences;
- Increase the security of processes;
- Reduce the financial impacts when incidents occur;
- Obtain competitive advantage in the labor market.
Go beyond documentations
ISO 22301:2019 provides information and requirements for companies, and from this, each organization performs its considerations according to its system, with its context, to achieve these objectives competently.
Therefore, as important as documenting all the data and plans is for the company to keep this active and constantly updated.
It is necessary that the entire team and stakeholders are involved in the process and prepared to face the adversities that may happen. And 22301 also assists in this process.
ISO 22301:2019 certification: a competitive differential for the company’s business
Even if the standard, generally, is implemented by larger companies, regardless of the branch or size of the organization, ISO 22301 is a support standard for the implementation of any management system.
With the business continuity management, your company can visualize more clearly the operations, identify failures, and thus propose the continuous improvement of processes.
With the standard, the organization can act in a preventive way, identify risks, anticipate problems in the processes and in the continuity strategies to quickly recover its operations in cases of interruption.
