The business impact analysis provides an empirical basis on which to determine business aligned recovery services and their attributes – Part 1

In previous blogs we covered the identification of policies and assumptions as DR planning foundations. The third foundation for effective DR planning is the empirically based Business Impact Analysis or BIA. The BIA refers to a process that determines the tangible cost to the organization should a business unit be unable to operate. This assessment provides the ROI for investing in DR mitigation. The relativity of the mitigation costs to an organization’s financial goals guides us in developing appropriate recovery objectives for the applications used by this business unit. The BIA is critical to the DR plan because it tells us how to determine what applications must be recovered first and how quickly those applications need to be recovered.

But what do you do if there is no budget and/or little interest in developing a formal BIA?. A good start is to visit the finance team and have them help in getting a handle on the revenue generated by each business unit last year. It is also important to get a handle on projected revenue for the coming year. Sometimes a business unit can come into being and generate an astonishing percentage of revenue from a new business line. Understanding the past and looking at how business units project the future is an essential part of the picture.

By Dick Benton, Principal Consultant with GlassHouse Technologies Inc.

to be continued…

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