Business Impact Analysis

Organizations across all industries continue to increase their reliance on information technology to perform day-to-day operations. This inherent dependence placed on technology has greatly increased both the exposure and impact an outage will have on an organization. When disaster strikes and your systems are down, is your organization prepared to recover in time?

Common pitfalls of disaster recovery and business continuity planning

As organizations become increasingly aware of this issue, they are allocating more resources to business continuity and IT disaster recovery planning. Unfortunately for most organizations, these plans are not always fool-proof and may become an inefficient use of resources. Common pitfalls of inadequate planning include:

• The organization fails to understand its IT environment and excludes some of the technologies that support operations
• The organization fails to prioritize which systems and processes are key for it to continue operating
• The organization fails to determine how long systems are able to be down

How Business Impact Analysis can add value to your organization

A Business Impact Analysis is a fundamental piece of an effective and comprehensive disaster recovery plan. The analysis will assist by developing a complete understanding of the IT environment along with producing impact ratings. Impact ratings will identify and prioritize the organization’s systems and processes, as well as the necessary recovery time and point objectives. By conducting a Business Impact Analysis, an organization will be made aware of any gaps in the current BCP / DR program and/or efficiently create a new program from scratch.

How can Freed Maxick help?

Freed Maxick can conduct a step by step Business Impact Analysis to provide your organization peace of mind. We will:

• Work with your organization to properly establish a complete understanding of the IT environment used to support operations
• Ensure management and business unit leaders have agreed upon the methodology used to complete the assessment
• Establish the qualitative and quantitative criteria used to assess the impact of your systems and processes
• Plan, coordinate, and execute the data gathering and analysis
• Assist in establishing clear Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)