Data Recovery Information

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery - Business Impact Analysis


Business impact analysis is a critical part of the business continuity planning process. This step quantifies data and gets into the real world issue of potential losses that can negatively impact your business. It is used to understand the most important impacts and how to best protect your people, processes, data, communications, assets and the organization's goodwill and reputation.

Organizations often think in terms of disaster recovery. Business continuity and the business impact analysis is more focused on keeping the business up and running and less focused on recovery after a disaster. The business impact analysis also is not focused only on the potential disasters, but on all potentially critical discontinuities. Key elements of the Business Impact Analysis are to identify critical business functions, establish the maximum acceptable outage time for each of these functions and then to determine the impact of not performing those functions. This can be measured against regulatory, legal, financial, operations or customer service requirements.

Once the adequacy of security and controls is evaluated and critical business functions and outage times are defined, the business continuity planner needs to develop an understanding of the probability of threats factored by the severity or impact and to start to develop a cost benefit analysis of the largest impact and highest probability threats.

It's virtually impossible to create an absolute value and prioritization of threats and impacts. Generally, a relational system is used to drive out the key priorities. Often, each threat is evaluated according to its probability and assigned a 1, 5 or 10 rating. Then, each threat is evaluated according to its impact on critical business functions and on the business overall. For example, a discontinuity in a critical business function of less than one hour might receive a value of 0. A discontinuity of one to eight hours might be ranked a 1, eight to twenty four hours might be ranked a 2 and over 24 hours might be ranked a 3. Obviously, these rankings need to be developed on a company specific basis. Probability factored by impact creates the relational prioritization list.

This approach to risk evaluation and control allows management to start to quantify the risks and potential impacts on the organization in a thoughtful and analytical way. This results not only in higher quality decisions, but also provides an audit trail that demonstrates that management is paying attention to its risk management responsibilities. These responsibilities might be established by regulatory or legal bodies, demanded as a contractual commitment by customers or simply expected by shareholders as sound and prudent management. The key corporate goals are to protect people, protect assets, protect data and to protect the brand and reputation of the organization.

About The Author

Robert Mahood has significant technology and management experience in data communications, internet, storage, disaster recovery and data recovery. He is currently the president of Midwest Data Recovery. www.midwestdatarecovery.com

bmahood@midwestdatarecovery.com, 312 907 2100 or 866 786 2595


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Supplementary Article

Data Recovery Made Easy

01/06/09

by Emil Malmberg

Today millions of people all around the world depend on their computers for their daily work, and while modern computers are fairly reliable millions of dollars are lost every year due to technical problems and loss of data. If you spend more than a few hours per month in front of your computer you probably have some important documents and emails somewhere on your harddrive. In fact, many computers users have the result of hundreds of hours of hard work stored on their harddrives. What most people do not realize though, is that computers and harddrives is not a very secure place to store important information. A virus attack, disk crash or even a human error can easily wipe out irreplaceable files or your entire harddrive. While it is possible, although very expensive, to recover information from a crashed or erased harddrive, there is only one simple way to protect your files, emails and other data from crashes and technical disasters. Save backups on CDs, DVDs or some other secure media and update your backups daily! If you have an up to date backup, expensive and complicated data recovery procedures are no longer necessary.

Creating Backups the Easy Way
When creating backups, it is important that you update you backups often or they will not be very useful. To accomplish this I strongly recommend that you use a backup software with built-in scheduling. If your backup software can write your backups directly to a CD or DVD, that's even better. WinBackup is a new backup solution from LIUtilities that makes it very easy to schedule backups of files, documents and emails. WinBackup can update your backups automatically on a daily basis. Since WinBackup also includes fully automatic CD/DVD burning you can even leave your backup DVD disc in the DVD writer all the time and it will automatically be updated every day (or night). WinBackup can also encrypt and compress your backups on-the-fly. By compressing your backups you can often store over 1 GB on a single CD or 10GB on a DVD. Encryption ensures that no one else will be able to access your backups, which may contain sensitive information or documents. WinBackup also lets you backup file from other computers on the network and you can store your backups on server any where on the network. If you are using 256-bit encryption you can even store your backups online without compromising security. Creating backups of important files, emails and documents on a regular basis is simply the cheapest and most efficient way to recover your data after a crash.


About the Author

Software developer for LIUtilities ( www.liutilities.com )

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