In Brief
For financial and advisory businesses, disruption does not always mean the whole company stops operating.
A critical system, employee, supplier or source of information may become unavailable while customers and counterparties still expect services to continue.
ISO 22301 provides a structured Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) for identifying priority services, understanding their dependencies, preparing recovery arrangements, and testing whether those arrangements work. ISO describes ISO 22301:2019 as the international standard for establishing and continually improving a BCMS. [Source]
The key questions are:
• Which services must continue?
• How long can they be unavailable?
• What people, information, systems and suppliers do they depend on?
• What happens when one of those dependencies fails?
• Have the recovery arrangements actually been tested?
Your Business May Be Open While a Critical Service Is Down
Consider a financial or advisory firm whose employees can still work, but its main customer platform is unavailable.
Or a mortgage adviser who cannot access application records.
An investment business loses access to an important data provider.
A cyber incident forces a fintech company to isolate part of its network.
A key employee responsible for an important client or process suddenly becomes unavailable.
