Business continuity plan

Plan how to keep information security at the right level during disruption.

What the ISO 27002 guidance expects the document to say: Requires the organisation to plan how information security will be maintained at an appropriate level while a disruption is under way.

Document and maintain business continuity plans that guide teams through response and recovery, collectively containing the actions to continue or recover prioritized activities within predetermined time frames, the means of monitoring the disruption and the response, the pre defined thresholds and process for activating the response, procedures to deliver products and services at agreed capacity, and how the immediate consequences are managed with regard to individual welfare, prevention of further loss and environmental impact; each plan must state purpose, scope and objectives, the roles and responsibilities of the implementing team, the actions implementing the solutions, the supporting information needed to activate, operate, coordinate and communicate including activation criteria, internal and external interdependencies, resource requirements, reporting requirements and a stand down process, and must be usable and available at the time and place it is needed.

Implement and maintain a response structure enabling timely warning and communication to relevant interested parties, with plans and procedures to manage the organization through a disruption and to activate continuity solutions, identified and documented from the output of the selected strategies and solutions, and with procedures that are specific about immediate steps, flexible to changing internal and external conditions, focused on the impact of incidents, effective at minimizing that impact, and explicit about roles and responsibilities.

Financial entities shall put in place an ICT business continuity policy and ICT response and recovery plans (including measures, procedures and arrangements) to ensure continuity of critical or important functions, quickly contain damage, resume activities and recover, subject to regular testing.

This category asks the entity to be able to keep providing its services, or to restore them, when systems fail or are attacked. Backup management means backups that are taken, protected against the same event that takes out production, and demonstrably restorable, which is why restore testing rather than backup success rate is the evidence that counts. Disaster recovery means recovery objectives that were derived from what the service can actually tolerate, and infrastructure and procedure capable of meeting them. Crisis management is the decision-making layer above both: who declares a crisis, who can commit the organisation, how the entity communicates while under pressure. Because NIS2 is concerned with continuity of service to recipients, recovery objectives set purely from internal convenience are the usual weak point.