ISO Publishes Benchmark for Incident Preparedness, Operational Continuity Management - ISO PAS 22399
December 5, 2007 // Published as a news service by IHS
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The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published a document that will address incident preparedness and continuity management for organizations in the public and private sectors.
ISO/publicly available specification (PAS) 22399:2007 - Societal security - Guideline for incident preparedness and operational continuity management is based on best practice from five national standards from Australia, Israel, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S.
Natural disasters, acts of terror, technology-related accidents and environmental incidents demonstrate that neither public nor private sectors are immune from crises either intentionally or unintentionally provoked, said ISO.
ISO/PAS 22399 is designed to establish the process, principles and terminology of incident preparedness and operational (business) continuity management (IPOCM) within the context of societal security.
ISO/PAS 22399 is the first deliverable from ISO technical committee (TC) ISO/TC 223, Societal Security, which is charged with developing standards in the area of crisis and continuity management.
According to Ivar Jachwitz, convener of the task group responsible for drafting ISO/PAS 22399, "The purpose of the guideline is to provide a basis for understanding, developing and implementing incident preparedness and operational continuity management within an organization and to provide confidence in organization-to-community, business-to-business and organization-to-customer/client dealings."
"ISO/PAS 22399 represents a major breakthrough in addressing emergency and disaster preparedness, response and continuity," said Dr. Stefan Tangen, secretary of ISO/TC 223. "It … provides an international agreed upon benchmark for emergency and disaster management for individual organizations.
"The guideline is a tool to allow public or private organizations to consider the factors and steps necessary to prepare for an unintentionally, intentionally or naturally caused incident (disruption, emergency, crisis or disaster) so that it can manage and survive the incident and take the appropriate actions to help ensure the organization's continued viability."
ISO/PAS 22399 describes a "holistic" management process that identifies potential impacts that threaten an organization and provides a framework for minimizing their effect, claims ISO.
Swedish Standard Institute (SIS) is responsible for the secretariat of ISO/TC 223 and the committee is comprised of representatives from business, industry, the first responder community, emergency and disaster managers, security professionals, government and nongovernmental organizations from more than 50 countries.
Source: International Organization for Standardization (ISO).