Beyond the Checkbox: How All Quiet Ensures ISO 27001 ICT Readiness by Crushing Your RTO (A.5.30)

The road to ISO 27001 certification often focuses on prevention. Firewalls, access control, and documented policies. However, a crucial part of the standard is admitting that failure is inevitable. This is where the policies on Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) come into play, specifically addressing controls A.5.29 (Information security during disruption) and A.5.30 (ICT readiness for business continuity).

While your existing incident management plan handles daily outages, these controls govern how you recover from a major crisis, where speed is measured by your Recovery Time Objective (RTO). All Quiet is the critical communication and coordination layer that guarantees you meet those tight RTOs.

The Compliance Challenge: RTO and RPO

The control A.5.30 (ICT readiness) requires you to have a documented, tested plan for restoring your critical IT services within a specified time. This time is your RTO.

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum tolerable length of time that a system can be down after a disruption.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum amount of data loss (measured in time) that is acceptable.

A major disruption, be it a regional outage, a core database failure, or a complex cyberattack, is a critical and chaotic event. Your documented recovery procedures are worthless if the right people aren't engaged instantly, across redundant communication channels.

How All Quiet fits into the bigger picture: The Engine for RTO Adherence

All Quiet ensures that when your primary systems are failing (a true DR scenario), the process of restoration is still robust, secure, and auditable.

1. Guaranteed Communication Redundancy (A.5.29)

A core requirement of BC is ensuring that communications can continue even when your primary methods (like corporate email or Slack) are disrupted.

Ensuring Multi-Channel Alerting: All Quiet’s multi-channel alerting system (phone calls, SMS, Native App notifications with do-not-disturb overrides) provides the necessary communication redundancy. Even if the main communication channel for an on-call team is down, All Quiet automatically escalates to a back-up method, ensuring your DR team is mobilized within the first minute. Reaching your on-call team even when your main communication channel is down is a crucial factor for meeting a sub-60-minute RTO.

2. Clear Command Structure and Delegation (A.5.30)

Major incidents require a clear chain of command for critical decision-making. Auditors need to see documented procedures for leadership engagement during a crisis.

Clear escalation policies are your documented DR flow chart in action. Besides the defined escalation tiers as the core of tackling the escalation policies, All Quiet customers can design defined rules dedicated purely to "Severity 1: Disaster" events - within All Quiet named “Critical” Incidents - that immediately notify senior management, security officers, and the recovery team in parallel. This proves your ICT readiness plan has a defined management structure and relevant escalation points, as required by the standard.

3. Practicing the Plan (Tabletop Exercises)

A plan that hasn't been tested is not a plan. ISO 27001 requires the verification and evaluation of your continuity measures.

The All Quiet Solution: Use the platform to run live or simulated tabletop exercises. By triggering a simulated "DR Incident" within All Quiet, you can log the time-to-engage, the adherence to documented steps, and the overall recovery time. This generates the precise log evidence an ISO auditor needs to verify that your RTO is achievable and that the team is trained.

Our Key Takeaway: ISO 27001 compliance is not just about having a DR plan. It's about proving you can execute it when it matters most. All Quiet will transform your static DR document into a dynamic, reliable, and auditable recovery execution layer.