The business continuity challenge
Ransomware, supplier failure, outages and physical incidents all stop revenue in the same way — the question your board, regulators and customers ask is how quickly you recover. Most organisations have plans on paper that have never been tested against a real recovery-time objective.
ISO 22301 is the international standard for a business continuity management system. It moves you from documents that sit in a drawer to a tested, measurable capability — and gives customers and regulators independent assurance that you can keep operating.
Who needs ISO 22301
ISO 22301 matters most where downtime has a direct financial, safety or regulatory cost:
- Banks, NBFCs and payment providers under RBI and regulator continuity expectations.
- SaaS, cloud and data-centre operators whose customers require proven resilience.
- IT/ITES and BPO providers whose contracts and RFPs demand a certified BCMS.
- Healthcare, manufacturing and critical-infrastructure operations where downtime is a safety issue.
CyberSigma’s role
We are your implementation and readiness partner. We assess your gaps, run the BIA and risk assessment, build the BCMS, exercise the plans, run the internal audit, and coordinate the certification-body audit — a single team from readiness through to a signed certificate.
The certification body’s role
The ISO 22301 certificate is issued by an accredited independent certification body, not by CyberSigma. Keeping implementation and certification separate is what makes the certificate credible. We prepare you for that audit and coordinate it; the body conducts it and issues the certificate.
How we deliver
Gap assessment
We assess your current continuity arrangements against every ISO 22301 clause and Annex requirement, and give you a prioritised gap list — what exists, what is missing, and what needs to change before a certification audit.
Business impact analysis & risk assessment
We run the BIA to establish your critical activities, recovery time and recovery point objectives, and dependencies; then a disruption-risk assessment so continuity strategies are driven by evidence, not assumption.
BCMS implementation
We build the business continuity management system — policy, roles, continuity and recovery plans, and the documented procedures — sized to your organisation rather than a generic template, and workable for the teams who have to run it.
Internal audit & readiness review
We run the internal audit and a management review, exercise and test the plans, close findings, and confirm you are ready before the certification body arrives — so the external audit holds no surprises.
Deliverables & evidence
- BCMS policy, scope and Statement of Applicability
- Business impact analysis with RTO/RPO and dependency mapping
- Disruption risk assessment and treatment plan
- Continuity and recovery plans, with exercise and test records
- Internal audit report, management review minutes and corrective actions
- A traceable evidence pack ready for the certification body audit
Indicative timeline
A typical mid-size BCMS runs about 3–5 months from kickoff to the certification-body audit, depending on scope, the number of critical activities, and how mature your current continuity arrangements are.
Timelines vary with scope and readiness; we confirm a schedule after the gap assessment.
Representative engagement
A payments-technology provider needed a certified BCMS to satisfy sponsor-bank and enterprise-customer resilience requirements. We ran the BIA across its critical services, set evidence-based RTOs, rebuilt its recovery plans, exercised them with the operations team, and took the organisation through internal audit to a successful certification-body assessment. Named client references are available under NDA on request.
Who leads your engagement
Your engagement is led by a senior ISO 22301 lead implementer and auditor — supported by continuity and risk specialists matched to your sector. Every deliverable passes independent quality review before it reaches you or the certification body. We introduce your named lead on the first call.