Business Continuity
Self-Assessment Tool

How this tool can help

The Business Continuity Self-Assessment Tool is an easy-to-use online Flash®-based tool that can help you identify gaps and areas for improvement in your current disaster recovery plan.

IBM's Business Continuity and Resiliency Services have identified three categories of threats that need to be addressed to improve business resiliency. By answering questions in each of these categories — business, data and event — areas of improvement can be identified.

System requirements: Flash player, version 7 or higher.

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If you choose not to download Flash and use the tool, you can take a good initial step toward becoming a more resilient business by answering the questions below. These questions, developed for the tool, can help you assess your current state and potential needs.

When you’re ready, call the number in the module to the right. Having the answers to these questions will help the Business Continuity and Resiliency Services team identify how we can help. In addition, we can forward you more information about our services, valuable white papers and business continuity insights.

Please review the questions below from all three categories of the Business Continuity Self-Assessment Tool. We look forward to speaking to you about improving your business resiliency.

Question 1:
Your CEO believes all business processes, applications and information assets are equally important. You know better.

How confident are you that you can prioritize business processes to determine which should be restored first?

Question 2:
A critical server is down and now you're plagued with low availability issues.

How easy is it for you to calculate the cost of downtime to your company?

Question 3:
Success has its pitfalls. Your marketing campaign scored a direct hit. But your overloaded servers can't handle the spike in demand.

How confident are you that you can quickly restore normal operations in order to maintain acceptable levels of service to your users?

Question 4:
A competitor has just failed to meet regulatory requirements. Avoid their fate and you stand to profit.

How well do you address compliance requirements and adapt quickly to change?

Question 1:
Rolling blackouts have interrupted electrical service where your primary systems are located.

How accessible is your critical data when faced with a power interruption?

Question 2:
Your servers go down, disrupting business as usual. Your data is not lost, but it needs to be recovered.

How quickly can you recover critical data?

Question 3:
A software virus has compromised your system, deleting and damaging confidential files. This compromise could expose your company to significant liability.

How well can you protect against possible data loss?

Question 4:
A litigation request requires you to obtain certain data from archives more than 10 years old. This must happen in the next 48 hours.

How well does your e-mail and data archiving capability meet your business requirements?

Question 1:
A Category 5 hurricane strikes. Buildings and roads are damaged and normal communications are knocked out. City officials are in crisis mode. Employees are looking to you for guidance.

How well can you account for and respond to all employees if normal communication channels aren’t available?

Question 2:
An avian flu pandemic strikes. Your employees refuse to commute to work.

How confident are you that your pandemic-specific policies, guidelines and management structure can mitigate the effects of a pandemic?

Question 3:
Your disaster plan implemented in 2001 may not be up to current standards, having not been tested since then.

How frequently do you test your disaster plan?

Question 4:
In some industries, downtime can cost millions of U.S. dollars per hour. Worldwide, acceptable recovery time objectives (RTOs) are rapidly approaching zero.

How well does your plan achieve recovery time objectives based on the parameters set by your company?

To contact IBM about business continuity and resiliency, click here.

To take the Flash®-based Business Continuity Self-Assessment,