A Certification Standard Has Not Emerged, Conference Board Says

A new report from The Conference Boards says the majority of US businesses have a formal, written plan in place for emergency preparedness – but the report also says a widely adopted certification standard has yet to emerge.

According to an article in Certification magazine, close to 75 percent of the senior corporate executives surveyed said an emergency preparedness plan exists in their companies.

“Currently, the most significant finding is that none of the many standards proposed for certification has attained widespread usage in the private sector,” Thomas Cavanagh, senior research associate for global corporate citizenship at The Conference Board, told the publication.

The most common standard is the ISO 27001/17799 information security standard, which the survey found 23 percent of companies have implemented. Twenty percent have implemented NFPA 1600, while 12 percent have implemented three other kinds of standards.

The report also found that larger companies are much more likely to have implemented the most widely known standards. At the enterprise level, 30 percent have adopted the ISO information security standard, compared with 24 percent of mid-markets and 15 percent of small businesses.

And despite its high visibility as the National Preparedness Standard, NFPA 1600 has been implemented by 29 percent of large companies and less than 18 percent of those below the enterprise level. NIMS (the National Incident Management System) has been adopted by 19 percent of enterprise-level firms, compared to 10 percent of mid-markets and only four percent of small companies.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.certmag.com/industry_news/2008/April/2607/index.php