ISO 22301

The International Organization for Standardization Standard 22301 addresses the requirements necessary to maintain a document management system against disruptive incidents. ISO 22301 implements a Plan-Do-Check-Act schema to help improve business continuity.

ISO Standard 22301 encourages evaluation of a business continuity management system in order to ensure to gets the intended results. The MAO (Maximum Acceptable Outage) is the time it would take for a faulty plan to lead to results which would be unacceptable. The MBCO (Minimum Business Continuity Objective) is the minimum level of services necessary for an organization to achieve its objectives during a disruption. ISO 22301 sets time frames to re-implement crucial services and specifies how warnings are to be given when there is a threat to business continuity.

The involvement of senior management and the participation of an internal advocate are crucial for the success of a program to protect a business's document management system. Individual departments must be required to follow the same standards and cooperate. Companies may already have measures in place which help them to conform to ISO 22301. Routine internal audits should be performed to ensure compliance to the standard.