Compliance · Certifiable standard

ISO 22301 — business continuity management

Prove you can keep operating when something breaks.

ISO 22301 certifies a business continuity management system — the discipline of knowing which activities matter most, how long they can be down, and what you actually do when they are. Customers in critical supply chains increasingly require it.

BIA

Starts with

RTO / RPO

Defines

3 yr

Certification cycle

What ISO 22301 requires

Not a binder on a shelf — a tested system with measured recovery objectives.

Business impact analysis

The BIA identifies your prioritized activities and how quickly each must resume before the damage becomes unacceptable. Everything downstream depends on getting this honest.

Recovery objectives

RTO (how fast you recover) and RPO (how much data you can afford to lose) turn vague intent into engineering requirements you can actually design against.

Exercise and improve

Plans must be tested and improved. An untested continuity plan is a hypothesis, and auditors treat it that way.

Who needs ISO 22301

Organizations whose downtime becomes somebody else's emergency.

  • Critical infrastructure, utilities, and healthcare
  • Financial services under regulatory resilience expectations
  • Manufacturers and logistics providers in tight supply chains
  • Any vendor whose customers demand proven resilience

How intSignal gets you there

We do the readiness, build and run the controls, and support you through the audit — we are not the auditor, and we keep that separation deliberate.

Business impact analysis

We run the BIA and get real answers on which activities matter and what downtime genuinely costs.

Objectives & strategy

We set RTO/RPO per activity and design continuity strategies that meet them within budget.

Plans that work

We write continuity and recovery plans someone can actually execute at 3 a.m. under stress.

Technical resilience

We implement the backup, failover, and redundancy the objectives require — and verify restores.

Exercises

We run tabletop and functional exercises, then feed findings back into the plans.

Certification support

We prepare the BCMS for Stage 1 and Stage 2 audit and support surveillance.

How the engagement runs

1

Scope & BIA

Define scope and run the business impact analysis.

2

Set objectives

Agree RTO/RPO and continuity strategies.

3

Implement

Build plans and the technical resilience behind them.

4

Exercise

Test, measure, and improve.

5

Certify

Stage 1 and Stage 2 audit, then surveillance.

Frequently asked questions

How is ISO 22301 different from a disaster recovery plan?

DR is the technical subset — restoring systems. ISO 22301 covers the whole business: which activities are prioritized, who decides, how you communicate, how you operate degraded, and how you improve. DR is one input to it.

Do we need ISO 22301 if we have ISO 27001?

27001 includes continuity considerations, but at nothing like this depth. If customers or regulators are specifically pressing on resilience, or downtime is your biggest business risk, 22301 is the standard that speaks to it directly.

How often must plans be exercised?

The standard requires exercising at planned intervals and after significant change; it doesn't dictate a frequency. In practice, annual functional exercises with more frequent tabletops for critical activities is what stands up to audit — and to reality.

Other frameworks we support

Most of the work transfers. Once controls are mapped and evidenced, a second framework costs a fraction of the first.

ISO 22301 for your environment

Tell us where you are and who’s asking for it — we’ll come back with scope, gaps, and a realistic timeline.