ISO 22301 playbook: the resilient factory¶
OT systems are mission-critical. Any downtime can disrupt production, safety, and revenue. ISO 22301 ensures structured continuity and disaster recovery processes are in place.
The playbook is not a tutorial. It is for executives, managers, and OT professionals who have already deployed systems, and now need to verify coverage, spot gaps, and prepare for an audit.
The stages follow the standard's own order. Walk the floor, chart the storms, build the emergency systems, write the drill book, run the drills, assemble the dossier, and learn from what the storm leaves behind.
Compliance is treated as something derived from observed system behaviour rather than demonstrated through documentation alone. Each continuity control encodes an assumption about how the factory will behave under disruption: whether the failover will engage, whether the recovery procedure will work under pressure, whether the team will know their roles when a real incident interrupts normal working patterns. The evidence that is relevant is not that procedures are written and controls are installed, but that they produce their intended effect under conditions that approximate the actual disruption: a tested restoration confirming backup integrity, a tabletop exercise revealing gaps in the incident reporting chain, a PoC or red team scenario checking whether a cyber incident is contained as the OT continuity plan assumes it will be.
Last updated: 8 July 2026