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info@canadiancyber.ca
Abdul Samad Saleem
October 16, 2025
ISO 27001 Control 5.33 ensures your organization stays operational during IT disruptions. Learn how ICT readiness strengthens business continuity, reduces downtime, and keeps your team prepared when technology fails.
What happens when your systems go down not for minutes, but hours?
Do your people know what to do?
Can your business keep running, or does everything grind to a halt?
That’s the real test of cybersecurity maturity not just preventing incidents, but recovering fast when they happen.
That’s where ISO 27001 Control 5.33 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Readiness for Business Continuity steps in.
It ensures your technology, teams, and processes are ready to keep operations alive even when disaster strikes.
Let’s be honest no organization is immune to disruption.
Power outages, ransomware, hardware failures, or even a careless human mistake can stop critical systems.
Control 5.33, defined in ISO/IEC 27002:2022 Section 5.33, is an Organizational control that’s both preventive and corrective.
It protects Availability (and indirectly, Integrity and Confidentiality) through the Protect and Recover cybersecurity concepts.
Simply put: it’s about making sure your business keeps running when technology doesn’t.
Assess What’s Critical
Identify which IT systems and communication channels your business can’t live without.
Build Redundancy
Use backups, failover systems, and cloud resilience features to keep services running.
Plan for Communication
Ensure employees, clients, and vendors can stay in touch even if normal channels go down.
Test, Don’t Assume
Run simulations and recovery tests. Find weaknesses before real incidents expose them.
Integrate With Business Continuity Plans (BCP)
IT recovery must align with your organization’s broader continuity and crisis response strategy.
🚫 Assuming backups are enough (until you find out they weren’t).
🚫 Never testing recovery plans.
🚫 Overlooking dependencies like external SaaS tools or network providers.
🚫 Ignoring the human side: communication and decision-making during downtime.
At Canadian Cyber, we often see great security teams fail their first real crisis not because of weak controls, but because they weren’t ready to operate without their systems.
We help businesses build realistic ICT continuity strategies, simulate outages, and train teams to respond with confidence.
Our approach blends technical resilience (like redundant servers and data replication) with operational readiness because technology is only half the equation.
If your disaster recovery plan lives in the same network that could go down
you don’t have a plan, you have a problem.
ISO 27001 Control 5.33 reminds us that true cybersecurity isn’t just about preventing attacks it’s about staying resilient when they happen.
You can’t control every incident.
But with readiness, you can control how fast you bounce back.
At Canadian Cyber, we provide:
ISO 27001 Business Continuity Integration Services
Disaster Recovery and Resilience Assessments
Incident Simulation and Readiness Testing
We also bring our expertise from delivering SOC 2 consulting for fast-growing startups, where we’ve helped clients navigate gap assessments, implement safeguards, and achieve compliance while staying agile.
👉 Ready to strengthen your ISO 27001 program? Book a free consultation here.
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