Are Bia Part of Business Continuity

What is a Business Impact Analysis

Business impact analysis (BIA) is a business discipline to provide an overview and categorisation of business processes to the overall business operations with the objective to establish a proactive response to the answer of which systems are more/less critical than others in case of an impact. A business impact analysis assigns risk and consequence to specific processes. It will also include estimated recovery times and recovery requirements for such scenarios to help upper management and business services.

We help our customers to provide a digital response to the Business Impact Analysis, and also to link it to overall risk assessments and subsequent continuity planning. Even though different activities, they are often supposed to be part of an annual cycle to improve on:

– Risk Assessments (RA) – What risks is your business exposed to?

– Business Impact Analysis (BIA) – what processes are the most important ones in case of a crisis?

– Business Continuity Planning (BCP) – what actions can you do to minimise the risk findings and recover quickly from an incident.

With our services, we can help you to establish RA, BIA and BCP online with a single-source-of-truth and turn it into a digital response.

The key focus to make a strong BIA is to capture your business processes, categorise them by business capabilities to get a management overview, and to assess the processes individually to ensure the right parameters are established in dialog with business owners, such as RPO, RTO, MTO etc. To establish a sustainable solution for BIA. you require process, practice and technology – we can offer it all to you. With a dialog and an end-to-end perspective we deliver you sustainability to business analysis and risk management.

What is a RPO, RTO, MTO?

We refer to RTO by business continuity standards to

"RTO, Recovery Time Objective: the target time set for recovery of service associated with a product, service or business application after an incident"

This actually means that RTO is crucial when implementing Business Continuity Planning (BCP) – calculating how quickly you need to recover will determine what kind of preparations are necessary. For example, if RTO is 30 minutes, then you need to invest quite a lot of money in a hot stand-by, equipment, hardware etc. – because you want to be able to achieve full recovery in only 30 minutes. However, if your RTO is 4 weeks, then the required investment will be much lower because you will have enough time to acquire resources after an incident has occurred. RTO is determined during the business impact analysis (BIA), and the preparations are defined in the actions and cards detailing the Business Continuity Planning. As the RTO looks forward from an incident, the RPO reflects a dual perspective, how old data can we accept to recover?

We refer to RPO by business continuity standards to

"RPO, Recovery Point Objective, the maximum tolerable period in which data might be lost"

Recovery point objective is supplementary, as the total timespan of RPO and RTO represents the window of no new data transaction! Ask yourself how much data you can afford to lose? If you are boarding a plane, is it tolerable to lose 1 hour of boarding information? or more? If you are writing a lengthy document, can you afford to lose some hours of work, if you handle an online shop, how many lost transactions can you live with? As these transactions may end up on paper and have to be typed manually after the incident. This number of hours or days is the RPO. Recovery Point Objective is crucial for determining one element of business continuity strategy – the frequency of latest valid backup.

Often there is a third term, MTO, which is key:

"MTO, Maximum tolerable Outage: the maximum time a business can tolerate the unavailability of service including recovered data"

MTO is also referred to as MTD (Maximum Tolerable Downtime) as it represents the additional time-delay it takes after the RTO to have data and business functions recovered. It is expected that mission critical systems (criticality 1) will have the lowest MTO values. From an IT-perspective the planning may be based on RTO, but from a business perspective, the total outage until data is recovered is considered the most important parameter.

Is Business Impact Analysis an IT or Business discipline?

We have seen technical solutions implemented in CMDB's taking starting point in applications space, but ideally, BIA is supposed to be a business centric discipline starting with the analysing business risk and impact, or in a higher abstraction of managing your business processes and operational excellence. Imagine what happens if an airline service cannot board their planes, a bank cannot pay out cash, or an online retailer cannot take payments – then your business hurts for every minute the processes are down. Such critical processes must be identified and documented in the BIA, and we bring advise, technology and practice to make it an ongoing process that the BIA parameters and recovery actions are tested and validated.

We enable the architecture and business functions to work collectively to prioritise which systems that should be recovered first by making the BIA as an ongoing and initial phase. If you lack a sound BCP or BIA, reach out for further information. We support the continuous improvement of architectural information before a disaster occurs. This focus is a contrast to many tools that often focus on plans where correctness is not validated until after a disaster occurs, typically with limited business context and limited enterprise design. Our choice is Next-Insight, a next-generation low-code platform  delivering a rapid solution to connect your architecture with business processes.

Our core philosophy is to drive these changes towards resilience, capture the information, and make it online available for decision makers to prevent disasters from happening. With the focus on business processes, the BIA aligns well with process modelling and process compliance, integrated features of Next-Insight. We support the construct of business capabilities, business processes, and business impact analysis, providing a link to the architecture by relating the processes to the business applications.

How is BIA related to BCP?

Regardless of what stage your business is at, you might experience questions like:

• What is my most critical business processes in case of a crisis event?
• What is the prioritised effort to recover systems if a cluster is unavailable?
• Are the processes well discussed and aligned with management? Do we agree on the priorities?
• If mail is impacted, how to communicate?

With the business perspective we offer solutions to Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Business Continuity Planning (BCP) allowing the organisation to participate and to take benefit from a single-source-of-truth of business process insights. BCPs and BIAs are around people, process, and technology – not just technology. We advocate the business context is put in focus with a BCP solution that provides collaborative insight, fresh data, and supporting CxO's priorities.

Our low-code digital solution, Next-Insight, is able to at scheduled intervals automatically to generate recovery documents that can be stored at secure backup locations and used in case an incident impacts the internet, however, most effort is done to provide a digital response in a crisis and to provide a plan-to-check-act learning cycle during regular exercising to improve the overall resilience.

We enable the architecture and business functions to work collectively to prioritise which systems that should be recovered first by making the BIA as an ongoing and initial phase. If you lack a sound BCP or BIA, reach out for further information. We support the continuous improvement of architectural information before a disaster occurs. This focus is a contrast to many tools
that often focus on plans where correctness is not validated until after a disaster occurs, typically with limited business context and limited enterprise design. Our choice is Next-Insight, a next-generation low-code platform  delivering a rapid solution to connect your architecture with business processes.

Our core philosophy is to drive these changes towards resilience, capture the information, and make it online available for decision makers to prevent disasters from happening. With the focus on business processes, the BIA aligns well with process modelling and process intelligence, integrated features of Next-Insight.

We support the construct of business capabilities, business processes, and business impact analysis, providing a link to the architecture by relating the processes to the business applications.
It is in this intersection between business processes, risk, and business applications that BIAs are always up to date. A successful BCP setup requires people, process, and technology supporting BIA.

We have many years of experience within process modelling and business architecture. We have helped many organisations break down their business operations into business capabilities and business processes. This enables the creation and maintenance of BIA and BCP plans, and provides companies to make informed decisions, based on planned and tested trial runs.

Working on process architecture results in a much better understanding of your company, its strategy, operations, activities and more. We will support and guide you on this journey, giving you are professional perspective on your business.

Reach out for advise of how to succeed with digital BIA and BCP planning.

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Source: https://www.staunstender.com/process-optimization/process-modelling/more-on-process-modelling/

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