It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. Understanding the business consequences of IT failure (or, let’s be positive, IT success) on business is essential in order to plan for uninterrupted business activity. A business impact analysis is a first step to achieving business operations that can “take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’ “. The business continuity manager or team has a choice of different tools and techniques for modeling business processes and the IT structures that support them. The goal of BIA is to be able to answer questions like: ‘“Can our business justify spending $5,000 per month on a high availability database system in order to eliminate a 10% chance of yearly database server failure that would cause business losses of $700,000?”
A complex systems universe
Even if IT systems are fundamentally built from ones and zeroes, the levels of complexity they can achieve can be staggering. As IT systems grow, their complexity soon outstrips the knowledge of any one person in the organization. The components of an IT infrastructure interact at different levels (hardware, software, human) and between different levels. Adding resources such as more servers or upgrading software increases this complexity. IT vendors provide some tools for mapping and modeling different IT resources: IBM Topology Editor for datacenter software is one example.Getting started with IT Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
Small changes in an IT infrastructure can have much larger consequences. Analyzing the consequence of failure of one component requires detailed understanding of the interdependencies between that component and the rest of the infrastructure. A BIA must take these aspects into account to help an organization answer questions like:- Which IT systems and processes are critical to business survival?
- What is the maximum acceptable time (may be zero) that such critical systems can be down?
- In what order and with what rapidity do different IT systems and processes need to be recovered in the event of failure
- What initiatives should justifiably be taken to avoid such outages in the first place?