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For enterprise-class storage, keeping data accessible at all times is essential because it is often critical to the survival of the enterprise. The challenge is that storage--like other information technologies--can experience downtime that negatively impacts business operations.

The principle of Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is to limit downtime and is an important part of every company's risk management strategy. To do this, you must understand the impact of outages, data security incidents, or other forms of unplanned downtime on IT systems, which is a critical part of having the right business continuity and disaster recovery solution.

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What is Business Impact Analysis (BIA)?

As part of a disaster recovery and business continuity plan, a business impact analysis is the first step. Business Impact Analysis is a formalized process that aims to quantify the potential impact of a service outage, rather than merely guessing what might happen to IT operations if something fails or is disrupted.

Business impact analysis differs from risk assessment, which uses various metrics to determine the risks facing an organization. For example, using a risk assessment, an organization might understand that a given application is at risk of attack and that it could negatively impact operations. Instead, when conducting a business impact analysis, organizations will not only focus on risk, but will also quantify how much impact IT systems will actually have on the business when they are disrupted.

Business impact analysis can also help organizations determine maximum tolerable downtime and determine the potential operational and functional impact of service outages.

How to conduct business impact assessment analysis

Performing a business impact analysis involves multiple steps and different people in your organization, and the results of this analysis must be built into your disaster recovery plan:

·Involve stakeholders. Importantly, stakeholders across different lines of business or IT systems are part of the process.

·Identify key assets. Take inventory of IT assets in the business, determine what they are for, and identify assets that are critical to business operations.

:: Assessing impacts. Consider the impact of asset or service disruptions, which may include lost sales, increased expenses, customer dissatisfaction, or even regulatory fines.

Business Impact Analysis Steps

After understanding which assets are critical and the potential impact of disruptions, the next step is to build an impact analysis matrix, which can be built using tools or even basic spreadsheets at the initial stage.

Matrix or worksheet identification for each IT process:

·Time or duration of interruption (in different time increments).

·What the operational impact of the disruption will be.

What financial impact will this disruption have?

Business interruption situation

There are many different scenarios that can disrupt IT operations in a business.

:: Environmental issues. For example, hurricanes, fires or other weather events can have an impact.

·Power failure. Power outages may result in disruption of operations or other services. (This is one of the reasons why enterprises are using cloud storage.)

·Cyber attacks. Some hackers target IT systems with malicious attacks aimed at disrupting day-to-day business operations.

·Unexpected data corruption. Errors are always present, employees or the application itself sometimes corrupts data and causes service outages.

Next: Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery

At the end of the business impact analysis process, the organization is able to summarize some form of business impact analysis report. While such reports can be useful in considering risk management and understanding the potential impact of different business disruption scenarios, the reports themselves do not actually help mitigate risk.

To mitigate risk, organizations need to consider business continuity planning and disaster recovery. Business continuity is the process of determining what needs to be done in the event of a failure or business interruption and how the business will continue to function.

Disaster recovery is to plan for data loss events and have the right solution to recover. If necessary, you can choose the disaster recovery solution provided by the service provider according to your actual situation.

Regardless of the choices an organization makes, it is important to remember that it is necessary to be honest, starting with business impact analysis. After all,"forewarned is forewarned."

Written by Sean Michael Kerner Source: Enterprise Storage

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