ISO 22301 Business Continuity — Prove You Can Operate Through Disruption
BCMS implementation and certification for organisations where downtime is not an option. Business impact analysis, disaster recovery planning, crisis management, and resilience testing — delivered by the same team that secures 200+ organisations across Asia-Pacific.
At a Glance
What Is ISO 22301 and Why Does It Matter?
ISO 22301 is the international standard for Business Continuity Management Systems (BCMS). It provides a framework for identifying potential threats to your organisation, assessing the impact of those threats on business operations, and building the organisational capability to respond effectively and recover rapidly.
A certified BCMS ensures your critical services continue operating — or are restored within defined timeframes — during disruptions such as cyberattacks, ransomware incidents, natural disasters, infrastructure failures, supply chain interruptions, or pandemics. Unlike a business continuity plan (BCP), which is a document, a BCMS is a management system — it embeds resilience into your organisation's governance, operations, and culture.
Certification provides independent, verifiable proof that your resilience capability is not just documented but tested, maintained, and continuously improved. This matters to regulators who expect demonstrable operational resilience, to enterprise clients who need assurance their supply chain can withstand disruption, and to boards who carry personal liability for governance failures. This is especially critical for organisations already maintaining PCI DSS or SWIFT CSP compliance.
Disruption Scenarios ISO 22301 Addresses
Cyberattack / Ransomware
Systems encrypted, data exfiltrated, operations halted. Average recovery without BCMS: 23 days.
Natural Disaster
Flooding, cyclones, earthquakes affecting offices, data centres, or critical infrastructure.
Infrastructure Failure
Data centre outage, power loss, network failure, cloud provider incident.
Supply Chain Disruption
Critical vendor failure, logistics interruption, or key supplier security breach.
Who Needs ISO 22301 Certification?
Any organisation where operational disruption carries significant financial, regulatory, safety, or reputational consequences.
Regulatory Mandate
Central banks and financial regulators across Asia-Pacific increasingly mandate business continuity frameworks for licensed institutions. Bangladesh Bank, MAS, BNM, BSP, SBV, NRB, and CBB all include operational resilience requirements in their supervisory guidelines.
Enterprise Client Requirement
Your enterprise clients need assurance that you can maintain service delivery through disruptions. ISO 22301 certification is increasingly a procurement requirement — particularly in financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure.
Post-Incident Improvement
You experienced a disruption — ransomware, infrastructure failure, or operational incident — and your response exposed gaps. A certified BCMS ensures the next disruption is managed, not chaotic.
EIC's 7-Phase BCMS Implementation Process
A structured approach that takes you from initial scoping to certification readiness — with testable, exercised plans, not just documentation.
Phase 1: BCMS Scoping and Context
We define the scope of your BCMS — which products, services, processes, and locations are included. We identify your organisation's context, interested parties (regulators, clients, shareholders, employees), and their resilience expectations. Scope determines everything that follows.
Phase 2: Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
The BIA is the foundation of your entire BCMS. Through structured workshops with business process owners, we identify your critical business activities, determine the impact of disruption over time (financial, operational, regulatory, reputational), and establish Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), and Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPD) for each activity. The BIA tells you what must be protected and how quickly it must be restored.
Phase 3: Risk Assessment
We assess the threats and vulnerabilities that could disrupt your critical activities — cyberattacks, natural disasters, infrastructure failures, supply chain dependencies, key person risks. Each threat is evaluated for likelihood and impact. The output is a prioritised risk treatment plan that drives your continuity strategy design.
Phase 4: Business Continuity Strategy Design
Based on your BIA and risk assessment, we design recovery strategies for each critical activity. This includes identifying alternative operating procedures, backup locations, technology recovery solutions, communication protocols, and resource requirements. Strategies must meet the RTOs and RPOs defined in the BIA — and must be practically implementable, not theoretical.
Phase 5: Plan Development
EIC develops your complete plan suite: Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) for each critical process, a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) for technology and infrastructure, a Crisis Management Plan for executive decision-making and communications, and an Incident Response Plan that links to your information security incident management. Plans are written for the people who will use them during a crisis — clear, actionable, role-specific.
Phase 6: Exercise and Testing Programme
Plans that have never been tested provide false confidence. EIC designs and facilitates a range of exercises: tabletop walkthroughs of specific scenarios (ransomware, data centre failure, pandemic escalation), functional exercises that test specific plan components, and full-scale simulation exercises that test your organisation's actual response capability end to end. Every exercise produces findings that feed back into plan improvement.
Phase 7: Internal Audit and Certification Preparation
Before the certification audit, we conduct a thorough internal audit of your BCMS, facilitate a management review, and confirm all documentation and evidence is complete. We support you through the Stage 1 (documentation review) and Stage 2 (implementation effectiveness) certification audits conducted by an accredited certification body.
ISO 22301 BCMS Deliverables
A complete, exercised business continuity management system — not just a folder of plans.
Business Impact Analysis
RTOs, RPOs, and MTPD for every critical business activity
Risk Assessment
Threat analysis with prioritised risk treatment plan
Business Continuity Plans
Process-specific BCPs with recovery procedures and role assignments
Disaster Recovery Plan
Technology recovery procedures, failover processes, and data restoration
Crisis Management Plan
Executive decision framework, crisis communications, and escalation protocols
Exercise Reports
Tabletop and simulation exercise results with lessons learned
Internal Audit Report
Pre-certification audit with findings and corrective actions
Complio Setup
BCMS integrated into compliance management platform for ongoing monitoring
Maintain Your BCMS with Complio
A BCMS requires continuous maintenance — plans must be updated, exercises must be scheduled, risks must be reassessed. Complio makes this manageable.
Complio — BCMS Lifecycle Management
Complio tracks your BCMS alongside your ISO 27001 ISMS (if applicable) from a single dashboard. Schedule and track exercises, maintain plan currency, monitor risk treatment progress, and generate board-ready resilience reports. When both ISO 22301 and ISO 27001 are managed through Complio, you eliminate the duplication and overhead of managing two separate management systems manually.
Why Choose EIC for ISO 22301?
ISO 27001 + ISO 22301 Integration
Most organisations need both. EIC delivers both from a single team, sharing risk assessments, audit programmes, and management reviews. Save 20–30% compared to separate implementations.
Plans That Actually Work
We write plans for the people who use them during a crisis — clear, actionable, role-specific. Then we test them through rigorous exercises until your team can execute them under pressure.
Security-First Approach
Business continuity must account for cyber threats — ransomware, data exfiltration, system compromise. EIC's security expertise ensures your BCMS addresses modern threats, not just natural disasters.
7 Countries, Local Context
Regulatory resilience expectations differ across Bangladesh, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Nepal, and Bahrain. We contextualise your BCMS for each jurisdiction.
Complio Platform
Ongoing BCMS management through Complio — exercise tracking, plan versioning, risk monitoring, and board reporting from a single platform.
200+ Security Engagements
EIC understands your operations because we've assessed, tested, and secured them. Our BCMS implementations are grounded in real-world knowledge of your threat landscape and infrastructure.
Regional Telecom Achieves Dual ISO 27001 + ISO 22301 Certification in 8 Months
A regional telecommunications operator with infrastructure across 4 sites needed both ISO 27001 and ISO 22301 certification. EIC delivered an integrated engagement — shared risk assessments, unified management reviews, and a single Complio deployment covering both management systems. The BIA identified 12 critical business processes with RTOs ranging from 2 hours to 48 hours.
ISO 22301 BCMS FAQs
Ready to Build Operational Resilience?
Schedule a free scoping call with a BCMS consultant. We'll assess your current resilience posture, identify critical business activities, and outline a realistic path to ISO 22301 certification.
Explore More
ISO 27001 Certification
ISMS implementation — often implemented alongside ISO 22301 for integrated security and resilience.
SOC Services
24/7 monitoring and incident response — your first line of defence when disruption strikes.
Complio Platform
Manage your BCMS and ISMS from a single dashboard — exercise tracking, plan versioning, board reporting.