What is ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management Framework?

Business continuity is an important element of any organization’s normal functioning. Having a detailed plan goes a long way toward making recovery processes after cyber attacks and natural disasters much more streamlined and convenient, especially in larger organizations. However, the sheer number of potential situations might make it difficult to predict and imagine any possible situation to work off of, necessitating the introduction of some sort of standard to use as a template for each situation.

This is where ISO 22301 comes in – an international standard with the primary purpose of acting as a framework for companies to use in terms of preparation, responding to, and recovering from all kinds of incidents, be it data breaches, natural disasters, power outages, etc.

This article not just covers ISO 22301, but also brings it into the context of backup and recovery solutions. Backup and recovery solutions are integral to maintaining business continuity, as they ensure that vital data can be restored quickly in the event of data loss or system failure.

As a result of global warming, rising geo-political tensions, ransomware and other threats, backup and recovery has become even more critical than ever in the realm of business continuity. Compliance with ISO 22301 would indicate that a backup and recovery solution supports a structured approach to risk management, recovery strategies, and mitigation of data loss, aligning with the broader goals of business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

More on this later in this blog. However, our first step would be to define the nature and purpose of ISO 22301 in more detail, but we would also like to cover the advantages, certification steps, and potential shortcomings of ISO 22301, as well.

What is ISO 22301 and Business Continuity Management?

ISO 22301:2019 “Security and Resilience – Business continuity management systems – Requirements” is the worldwide standard for BCMS – Business Continuity Management Systems, developed by the International Organization for Standardization. It is a comprehensive framework that assists companies with developing business continuity strategies while also identifying potential threats and assessing their potential impact in the process.

Assisting companies with the creation and improvement of BCMS is the primary goal of ISO 22301. Investing in a robust business continuity management plan can offer multiple benefits, including improved data resilience and dramatically lower impact of most disruptive events on the company’s well-being.

Main principles of ISO 22301 standard

ISO 22301 offers the means of creating and improving upon existing business continuity plans. There are several core principles that this standard uses in order to provide recommendations for companies:

1. Risk assessment is the first important element of this standard, identifying potential issues and ways of mitigating or resolving them. A clear understanding of all the company’s risks and potential issues should make it possible to reorganize the resources in an efficient manner to be ready for the most noteworthy issues beforehand.
2. BIA, or Business Impact Analysis, is the necessary part of the risk assessment process that allows the company to identify its business functions to assess their criticality and maintenance costs. Both of these values should make it possible to evaluate how disruptive it would be if each of these functions is suddenly disrupted (and how quickly an organization can restore the function in question to its working state).
3. Business continuity plan is formed with the results of both BIA and risk assessment in mind. That way, a business continuity strategy would be able to explain how exactly a company would maintain or restore each of its critical functions during and after a disaster of sorts – with backup systems, crisis communication plans, and alternate work locations being just a few examples of potential measures.
4. Incident response strategies also play an important part in ISO 22301 and its business continuity efforts, creating a well-defined outline of how a company is planning of detecting, responding, and managing various issues or incidents affecting the business. A clear and defined incident response protocol should be able to minimize the impact of a potential disruption, if not outright mitigate it.
5. Review and continuous improvement are both necessary to ensure the relevancy of a business continuity plan defined by ISO 22301. Regular audits and tests of existing plans and strategies would be able to showcase potential issues and areas for improvement in the future.

Following the requirements of ISO 22301 standard is a great way of developing a resilient business continuity strategy that offers multiple advantages to its users, including compliance improvements, data resilience enhancement, and more.

The PCDA model in ISO 22301 requirements

The structure of the ISO 22301 standard

ISO 22301, as a regulatory document, can be acquired for a price in either physical or electronic form. It is separated into ten primary clauses:

1. Scope
2. Normative references
3. Terms and definitions
4. Context of the organization
5. Leadership
6. Planning
7. Support
8. Operation
9. Performance evaluation
10. Improvement

Clauses 1,2 and 3 are used to define the scope, normative references, and definitions in the document, respectively. Clauses 4 – 10, on the other hand, outline the process of reaching a certain proficiency with business continuity plan creation.

ISO 22301 standard and PCDA

It should be noted that ISO 22301, like any other ISO standard, serves as an explanation of what a company must be able to achieve in order to reach the minimum proficiency in the standard – without detailed descriptions on how to achieve them (since they are still recommendations, first and foremost).

It also follows the Plan-Do-Check-Act model, which is a cyclical approach that explains continuous improvement in four basic steps:

• Plan – risk analysis, objective identification, and procedure establishment for separate elements of BCMS.
• Do – business continuity plan implementation using the processes developed in the previous step.
• Check – process monitoring and result measurements, as well as performance evaluation against existing policies and objectives.
• Act – various corrective actions based on the results collected during the previous step.

As you can see, this sequence of events is also similar to the selection of main principles that we mentioned before about ISO 22301 standard. It also begins with the planning and analysis processes before diving into the actual implementation and ending on a cycle of regular reviews and audits for improvement purposes.

ISO 22301 business continuity and backup solutions

As one of the primary practices in business continuity, backup and recovery processes and the software that provides them are all treated as important elements of the business continuity processes with a number of substantial advantages.

One of the most basic use cases of a backup system is the ability to protect data against many situations where it might be corrupted or compromised in some way, be it via a cyberattack, a hardware failure, a natural disaster, etc. The same logic can be applied to recovery processes as an inseparable part of the “backup and recovery” feature combination, offering quick and versatile data restoration capabilities to improve recovery times and minimize downtime.

Some backups can even go a step further and use the immutability feature as an optional feature, providing an additional security layer against various cyber threats to prevent any unauthorized user from interacting with immutable data. Additionally, backups are often used as an inseparable element for most compliance frameworks due to the ability to meet the requirements for regulatory or other frameworks with secure data storage.

Getting back to ISO 22301 requirements – a competent backup strategy would always be integrated with the business continuity plan to reach the necessary goals in terms of data resilience. Backup systems can also be monitored and improved upon, working as another requirement that was met for ISO 22301.

What are the benefits of ISO 22301 – the business continuity standard?

ISO 22301 as a standard can not only offer a degree of standardization to an environment but also provide a number of other advantages, most of which can even act as motivators for other companies to become certified with this standard as well. With that in mind, we can now go over the most noteworthy advantages of ISO 22301 as a business continuity standard:

• Risk management improvements make it possible to reduce or mitigate the company’s operational, financial, or reputational risks as a result of disruptive events.
• Enhanced operational resilience to improve the odds of a company getting through disruptive events with minimal damage.
• Regulatory compliance in the form of a company’s commitment to business continuity assists with meeting regulatory requirements (which, in itself, can be a competitive advantage in certain industries and fields of work).
• Higher confidence of stakeholders is made possible by a company’s commitment to creating a detailed and flexible BCMS in order to showcase its resilience and a level of preparation for various disasters.

The ISO 22301 certification process

Once a company has decided on going through with the certification process for this ISO standard, it has to go through a moderately complex sequence of events and actions, including:

1. Implementing an effective business continuity management system (BCMS) in accordance with all the processes mentioned above:
   1. Risk analysis.
   2. Plan implementation.
   3. Thorough internal audit.
2. Presenting the results of an audit and other details about the BCMS plan to the top management of the organization to identify areas for improvement and discuss resource allocation.
3. Requesting an external audit from an accredited independent certification body. The audit itself is comprised of:
   1. General overview of the system state.
   2. Documentation overview.
   3. A detailed on-site audit conducted to confirm compliance with the standard.
   4. Evaluation of the BCMS implementation and its efficiency.
4. If the audit manages to find some sort of non-conformities that make it impossible for the certification to be presented, the company needs to address all of these issues and provide proof of its resolution before the final decision is made.
5. Complete review of all the findings during the external audit to evaluate whether the ISO 22301 certificate can be granted.
6. Continued compliance has to be ensured with regular surveillance audits (once a year in most cases). The entire procedure has to be performed from scratch every three years for the sake of recertification.

The thoroughness of the evaluation process typically results in the evaluation process taking multiple months to complete depending on the company’s preparation levels, company size, and other factors, with the cases of a single evaluation taking an entire year being somewhat common for large and complex environments.

ISO 22301 and its correlation with other standards

Standards such as ISO 22301 practically never exist in their own bubble and would always have some sort of overlap with other standards or requirements in different industries. In this section, we would like to showcase the most noteworthy standards that overlap with ISO 22301 in some way or another.

ISO 27001

ISO 27001 – Information Security Management – has a substantial overlap with ISO 22301 in terms of managing risks and responding to incidents as active elements in business continuity planning. The biggest difference between ISO 22301 and ISO 27001 is the fact that the latter is much more specific with its target area, working specifically in the field of information security, which is one of several areas of interest for ISO 22301.

ISO 31000

ISO 31000 – Risk Management – has a moderate level of overlap with ISO 22301 due to the fact that both standards cover risk management as a topic. The ISO 22301 standard can provide much broader coverage of this area, though, and ISO 31000 can act as a detailed framework for risk control in multiple situations (including the creation of a BCSM).

ISO 9001

ISO 9001 is a Quality Management standard with a certain level of overlap with ISO 22301. In fact, ISO 22301’s general approach in the form of continuous improvements and process-based approaches is exactly what ISO 9001 covers, improving quality management while also boosting the resilience of an organization.

ISO 22313

As mentioned before, ISO 22301 standard provides a framework in the form of multiple requirements that have to be met in order to acquire certification, without mentioning the exact steps that have to be taken in the process. The big reason for that is the existence of ISO 22313, which is a Business Continuity Management Systems – Guidance standard, offering a detailed set of instructions on how the BCMS should be implemented, to begin with.

NFPA 1600

NFPA 1600 is a Standard on Continuity, Emergency, and Crisis Management, which closely resembles ISO 22301 in its structure. The biggest differences between the two are the fact that ISO 22301 is international and NFPA 1600 is oriented towards North America, as well as the fact that NFPA 1600 has a more detailed set of instructions for emergency management (making it a preferable option in some industries).

Potential challenges with implementing ISO 22301

ISO 22301 can serve as a great foundation for creating detailed business continuity policies with ongoing improvements. At the same time, the standard in question is moderately complex and tends to encounter multiple challenges along the way, some of which we are going to showcase below:

• Up-to-date documentation development and maintenance. Introducing dedicated plan management and documentation software early on in the BCMS development should reduce the severity of this challenge.
• Careful balancing between available resources and the potential scope of the BCMS. Limit the scope of the plan early on to allow for potential expansion in the future.
• Procurement of the resources and management commitment for the business continuity plan. Make sure that senior management is aware of the plans and processes for business continuity early on to mitigate the effects of this issue.
• Ensuring complete awareness and a high percentage of participation in the strategy realization. Invest in training and awareness programs to offer enough information for everyone involved.
• Performing BIAs and detailed risk assessments. Employ the help and guidance of professionals and certified consultants to resolve it.

ISO 22301 in the Context of Backup and Recovery

As mentioned previously in the article, backup and recovery systems are typically an essential part of achieving ISO 22301 certification. However, only some backup solutions meet or exceed the requirements for certification. One example of a comprehensive solution that exceeds all requirements from the backup and recovery perspective is Bacula Enterprise.

Bacula Enterprise can play a critical role for organizations aiming to achieve ISO 22301 certification by providing robust backup and recovery solutions that directly support business continuity management (BCM). One of the key aspects of ISO 22301 is ensuring that critical data and systems can be restored quickly after an incident to minimize disruption. Bacula Enterprise’s bare metal recovery feature is essential in this context, as it allows businesses to recover entire systems from scratch, even in the event of total hardware failure. This capability aligns with the ISO 22301 requirement to ensure that essential functions are restored effectively during disasters or system outages, supporting continuity of operations. Of course, having a Bare Metal Recovery capability is important for a backup solution, but critically, that solution has to be able to be integrated into an organization’s IT environment. Bacula is especially strong in this respect, with a level of flexibility that goes beyond its peers.

Beyond Bare Metal recovery, Bacula’s advanced reporting and monitoring capabilities provide organizations with detailed insights into the status of backups, recovery tests, and potential vulnerabilities. ISO 22301 emphasizes regular audits and continuous improvement of business continuity processes, and Bacula’s reporting tools offer clear visibility into the state of backup operations as well as prodigy powerful search tools for all media backed up by Bacula. These reports can be used to verify that recovery objectives are being met and to provide evidence of compliance during ISO 22301 certification audits. This ensures that an organization’s backup strategies are not only operational but also aligned with the certification’s requirements for preparedness and accountability.

Security is another crucial element of both ISO 22301 and Bacula Enterprise. Bacula offers high-security levels, including encryption of data in transit and at rest, which is fundamental for protecting critical business information from unauthorized access or breaches. ISO 22301 requires that organizations protect their data during disruptions, and Bacula’s security features help to meet these standards by ensuring that backed-up data remains secure, even when being restored after an incident. Bacula’s modular architecture also provides IT architects with various options on how and where to implement Bacula, further raising its security potential. At the time of writing, the largest defense organization in the West is relying on Bacula to backup and recover its critical data and applications. Overall, the above capabilities make Bacula a comprehensive solution for organizations looking to achieve and maintain ISO 22301 certification, while ensuring a strong and resilient business continuity framework.

Conclusion

Due to the current nature of the business environment, being able to maintain access to your information on a continuous basis in the face of various disruptions is a crucial element of any company’s success. ISO 22301 is a standardized framework for business continuity plans that showcase how the bare minimum of a BCMS should operate from start to finish.

Even though the step-by-step guide itself is not included in the standard, it remains an important cornerstone of business continuity efforts due to its standardized nature. The ability to become certified with this standard in mind also brings in a number of useful advantages, including better data resilience, more accurate risk assessment, improved confidence of shareholders, and even potential competitive advantage in certain fields.

Creating a comprehensive business continuity strategy while following ISO 22301 is not just a recommendation anymore – many industries demand such an approach from the get-go, making it practically mandatory for many situations. The existence of business continuity plans can also be treated as a strategic step for securing the future of your business environment in the long term, which is why using standards such as ISO 22301 is so highly recommended these days.