ISO22301: Planning for a pandemic

ISO22301: Planning for a Pandemic

The importance of having a business continuity plan has been dramatically illustrated by the current global Covid-19 pandemic and is inevitably now at the forefront of many business owners’ minds. Becoming compliant to the ISO22301 standard for Business Continuity Management Systems can help to save unnecessary disruption and limit the impact of events ranging from power cuts to floods to global incidents such as the one we are all experiencing right now. Ken Holmes, CertiKit’s Managing Director said, “There has possibly never been a more emphatic demonstration of the importance of business continuity than the current pandemic. Even as the emergency unfolds, businesses are becoming aware of the need to put their business continuity on a more stable and permanent footing, and the ISO22301 standard is the internationally-accepted way to do this.”

Business Contunity

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2019 Update

A new version of the ISO22301 standard was released by ISO on 31st October 2019 and CertiKit is in the process of updating our popular toolkit to align with the changes. Version 5 of the CertiKit ISO22301 toolkit will be fully aligned with the 2019 edition of the standard which, although not introducing any new requirements, has been restructured to better follow ISO’s layout for a management system, and to provide clarification of some of the existing requirements. Ken Holmes talks us through the upcoming changes to the toolkit scheduled for May 2020. “We are working hard on developing our ISO22301 toolkit further, to provide more content in our documents, more functionality in our tools and a fresh new layout. Of course, given the current global situation, we will be including more emphasis on planning for a pandemic, and on handling an evolving incident within the comprehensive framework that ISO22301 provides.”

Continual Development

Continual improvement is a core value of implementing an ISO standard and ISO22301 is no different. It requires your business to prepare for the effects of a potential incident in order to minimise disruption as much as possible and increase your ability to adapt to changing circumstances. By identifying potential risks in advance, it can reduce the impact and length of disruptive incidents.

Current customers of our toolkit who have an active update subscription will receive the revised version free of charge along with release notes identifying the changes. Businesses that are already a fair way down the line in implementing the standard for their organization will need to assess how best to incorporate the revisions within their existing ISO22301 framework. However, we would emphasise that the changes to the standard are not drastic and can be implemented by amending specific points highlighted in the release notes of the toolkit. Customers who have not yet purchased the toolkit and are waiting for the next release can sign up to receive an email notification when version 5 of ISO22301 toolkit is released by CertiKit.

More ISO22301 Resources

CertiKit is a provider of ISO toolkits, consultancy and internal auditing services, and has helped more than 4000 organizations worldwide with their compliance.

For more guidance on implementing the ISO22301:2019 standard, we’ve put together a list of our best free resources including sample documents, blogs and downloadable documents.

Free ISO22301 Resources

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Blog ISO22301: Planning for a Pandemic