Business impact analysis

What would it cost your business to be shut down for 1 hour? 1 day? 1 week? IBM business impact analysis identifies the critical business processes that most affect your revenue, your assets and your clients to help you prioritise the recovery strategies that might be needed during an extended business disruption.

Highlights

• Identifies which business processes and assets require the highest level of protection
• Includes recommendations on possible recovery strategies and alternatives
• Provides financial data to help you select the appropriate levels of investment for business protection

Understanding how your business works - which processes must interlock and be continuously available to sell, produce and support your clients - is the foremost goal of a business impact analysis. Our team of consultants is skilled at discovering the key linkages between your business management practices and your IT policies and resources. Their extensive experience across all industries allows for a very efficient and robust inventory of your vital assets and processes. Their expertise with a range of continuity and recovery strategies helps you pinpoint the critical processes and recovery time requirements needed for your business to survive a major disruption.

Comprehensive evaluation of your environment

IBM business impact analysis is an in-depth study that defines your critical business processes and the resources needed to support them. It examines both financial and intangible losses that could result if these systems, assets and data were not available due to an outage emergency.

This comprehensive evaluation of your environment identifies:

• The most critical business processes across your entire enterprise
• The maximum outage that a business process can sustain before it severely impacts the well-being of your company
• The financial, productivity and personal impacts of an extended business disruption
• An assessment of short-term business impacts and permanent business losses
• The priority of business process recovery
• The most vital records to protect and their required vintage for your business operations to resume successfully
• Diverse tactics to balance recovery costs with different risk thresholds.

This analysis defines specific interdependencies among business functions and key linkages among IT resources. It produces an enterprise- wide, business-focused view of your vulnerabilities and recovery requirements for any extended outage.

The costs of an outage are estimated in hours, days and weeks. This level of cost detail provides the essential foundation to make sound decisions about recovery programs. It allows you to accurately prioritise recovery of business processes and assign tolerable recovery time windows, so you can invest your resources where they matter most.

Benefits

• Efficient, in-depth analysis of the most critical functions in your business environment
• Understanding the financial losses and intangible impacts of an extended outage
• Identifying the most vital resources to support business processes
• Defining a recovery time window upon which to design your recovery strategies
• Making sound investment decisions on how best to resume business operations