A crucial starting point to develop an effective disaster recovery plan is to cultivate an efficient Business Impact Analysis (BIA).
The BIA evaluates the potential effect of interruptions to an organization's critical business operations; therefore, it is an essential component of the process as it highlights system or functional vulnerabilities and conveys processes or strategies to minimize the impact of the incident. This week you will conduct a BIA for an organization.
The organization can be a real company of your choice or a fictitious entity. The purpose is to have you engage and actively thinking about some of the components that are required to develop an effective BIA to guide disaster recovery planning efforts.
Briefly, provide some background about your company. Who is the company, its stakeholders, and the services it offers? Identify one critical business operation or core process.
What is the maximum allowable outage time for the operation or process? What technology, personnel, or other resources are required to support the process or operation? Identify at least three inputs and three outputs for the identified operation or process.
Elaborate on each of the inputs and outputs dependencies. Are there any regulatory or legal ramifications due to the function or process outage? If so, what are they? If not, explain why. While the process or function is inoperable, what viable temporary solution do you propose to address the situation?
What benefits will all that you have described have on the organization? What disadvantages will all that you describe have on the organization?