Public and private sector organisations today operate in a fragile, interconnected world where supply chains span one side of the planet to the other. Against this background, no enterprise should be thinking only about the impact of a disaster or disruption to its own business, but also about how it could affect supply chain partners, customers, and ultimately, the economy of a country or a region.
Today, we're starting to look at business continuity's role in keeping an economy going in the event of a disaster.
Brian Henry, MD, Caridon
That's according to Brian Henry, MD of Caridon, who says the publication of the International Standards Organisation's Societal Security ? Business Continuity Management Systems: Requirements standard (ISO 22301:2012) highlights the fact that business continuity has become an issue of national security.
"Twenty years ago, we all worried about our mainframes catching fire," says Henry. "Today, we're starting to look at business continuity's role in keeping an economy going in the event of a disaster." The Marikana strikes in SA and uprisings in Mali illustrate how interconnected modern economies are and how seemingly localised events can have a ripple effect on businesses, communities, and entire countries, he adds.
The implication is that organisations should be thinking about their place in wider supply chains, communities, countries and even regions. The very name of the ISO standard - highlighting societal security - illustrates that the philosophy of business continuity can and should be applied to keeping economies running when the worst happens, Henry says.
Serious decay
According to ISO, the ISO 22301 standard provides a framework to plan, establish, implement, operate, monitor, review, maintain and continually improve a business continuity management system. It's expected to help organisations protect against, prepare for, respond to, and recover when disruptive incidents arise.
It's meant to enable companies to show legislators, regulators, customers, prospective clients and other interested parties that they're adhering to good practice in business continuity management. A range of countries, including Singapore and the UK, have started to adopt ISO 22301, to replace their existing national standards.
South Africa has a way to go before it meets the standard's best practices. It is particularly concerning that little work has been done to quantify the importance and criticality of national assets such as the transport and electricity infrastructure, says Henry.
Some of this infrastructure has suffered serious decay in recent years and there are no clear plans in place to mitigate the risks of failure. "We should have a government agency looking at this at a national level," says Henry.
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