8.4.4 Business continuity plans
Document and keep up business continuity plans that lead teams through response and recovery. Taken together, the plans set out: the actions for keeping prioritized activities going, or restoring them, within time frames fixed in advance; how the disruption and the response will be monitored; the thresholds set beforehand, and the process, for triggering the response; procedures for delivering products and services at the capacity agreed; and how the immediate effects are handled with regard to people's welfare, avoiding further loss, and the environment. Each plan must state its purpose, scope and objectives; the roles and duties of the team that carries it out; the actions that put the solutions into effect; the supporting information needed to trigger, run, coordinate and communicate the response, including the triggering criteria, internal and external interdependencies, what resources are needed, what must be reported, and how the response is stood down; and it must be usable and to hand when and where it is needed.
Source: ISO 22301:2019, 8.4.4. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open ISO 22301:2019 in the compliance library.
These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.
system holds itEvidence a system already holds
none for this control
periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review
- Evidence of availability at the point of use, including offline copies · Policy repository / GRC workspace
governing documentDocuments that govern the control
- Plan set with each plan carrying every required element · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- Activation criteria and thresholds stated in the plan itself · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- Interdependency and resource sections reconciled to the BIA · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- Stand down process defined · Policy repository / GRC workspace
First move
Common gaps auditors find
- Plans that cover activation and response but have no stand down, so the organization never formally returns to normal
- Agreed capacity omitted, so continuing an activity at any level counts as success
- Welfare and environmental consequences unaddressed
- Plans held only in a document management system that the disruption may take out
- Interdependencies listed inside the plan that contradict the BIA
Do this for your whole sheet
Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.
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