The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has enabled free access to a number of standards for business continuity and risk management.
What’s meant by business continuity
Business continuity is a company’s ability to maintain relatively normal business operations during a major disruption, such as a natural disaster or a key employee leaving the business.
Globally, businesses are experiencing significant business continuity challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Business continuity plans
Ideally, all businesses should have a continuity plan. This allows a business to continue operating despite disruption. Your business continuity plan should include:
- oals and objectives of the plan
- roles and responsibilities of key personnel
- plans to mitigate risk in anticipation of a crisis
- tasks required to keep operations flowing
- coordination with local emergency personnel
- contact information of management personnel.
Free ISO standards for business continuity
To enable business continuity and risk management, the ISO has enabled free access to the standards below.
Business continuity management ISO standard
ISO 22301:2019 details the structure and requirements for implementing a business continuity management system (BCMS).
It can help an organization develop a business continuity plan that’s appropriate for its situation. It also provides guidance on how to monitor and review the effectiveness of the BCMS.
Supporting vulnerable persons ISO standard
ISO 22395:2018 provides guidance on identifying and protecting vulnerable individuals in a crisis.
It’s important to ensure that response and recovery procedures are tailored to the needs of these people.
It details how to tailor disaster responses to individual needs in terms of age, economic security, language and health.
Incident management ISO standard
ISO 22320:2018 helps organizations improve their incident management.
This can help save lives, reduce harm, and ensure continuity of essential societal functions.
These functions include telecommunications, food and water supply, access to electricity, fuel and health services.
This ISO document provides guidance to organizations responsible for responding to incidents on a local, national or global scale.
Organizational resilience ISO standard
ISO 22316:2017 can help organizations enhance their resilience to internal or external disruptions.
The document gives guidance on what makes an organization more resilient, and how to go about establishing these attributes.
The standard isn’t prescriptive though. Organizations have to tailor their approaches based on their own vulnerabilities and goals.
Risk management ISO standard
ISO 31000:2018 is a guide for managing risk from both internal and external factors and influences.
The document outlines recommended risk management principles, frameworks and processes.
Quality management software from isoTracker
At isoTracker, we don’t offer business continuity standards. However, we believe our quality management software can help businesses ensure continuity in their management processes.
This includes continuity in document control, as well as the management of risks, audits, company training, customer complaints, and nonconformances.
All our software is cloud-based. Off-site employees can use the same centralized, secure QMS platform you use normally. So there’s no need for delays, confusing process changes or security compromises.
Our software is designed to be affordable and flexible. Pay only for the modules you need, with a subscription pricing option based on the size of your business.
Sign up for a free 60-day trial of isoTracker’s quality management software to try it for yourself or contact us to discuss your needs.