Disaster recovery professionals welcome BSI standard

The British Standards Institution has published new specs for business continuity

The British Standards Institution (BSI) will publish its standard for business continuity later this month, a move that supporters predict will bring rigour to processes governing disaster planning.

A certification service for the BS25999-2 standard was launched on 30 October, about a year after the BS55999-1 Code of Practice specification was announced. The full specification document will be released later this month. It is expected that firms will apply for certification to show their compliance with the standard. HBOS, Scottish Power and logistics giant TDG have already shown interest.

Experts welcomed the prospect of BS25999.

“Business continuity tends to be a project-based thing,” said George Hall, director of business continuity at Jermyn Consulting, which is developing a BS25999 advisory service.

“Something happens so everyone dusts off their plans and off they go. Anything that makes business continuity an ongoing process, and communicates that it is a management issue is valuable.”

Hall added that the importance of modern interdependent business networks will see even smaller firms comply. “We see supply chains as a powerful issue and the IBMs of this world will mandate it,” he added.

Steve Beck, Hitachi Data Systems business continuity consultant, said that the standard is likely to gain international recognition and become an ISO standard.

“Organisations that operate to the best practices and gain the certification through audit will not only help them differentiate themselves from their competitors but will also add to the UK's overall resilience in a world that is fraught with new and developing threats," Beck said.

Supporters noted that BS25999 has become the most downloaded standard from the BSI website in recent times.

Ron Miller, managing consultant at business continuity giant SunGard Availability Services, said, “The signs are that a lot of organisations are see king to adopt it and it’s going to make a big difference but it will be gradual. Companies will make their own minds up as to what appetite for risk they have and, for some, the cost of things like real-time disk-to-disk backup will be prohibitive.”

Hitachi’s Beck said, “I am seeing the larger organisations moving to adopt the best practices and attain certification to assure their customers and stakeholders of their resilience capabilities, and at the same time address some of the requirements of their, industry respective, regulatory compliance directives. To ensure continuity of supply chain, these larger companies are already asking their suppliers to demonstrate a similar resilience capability, and it is likely that this knock-on effect will gather pace steadily in 2008, further propagating the adoption of the standard.”

BS25999 is expected to be supplemented in late 2008 by another standard that is currently in the works. Intended to be specifically focused on IT service delivery issues, the BS25777 specification is currently at the comments stage.