The Data Center Side of Business Impact Analysis


Written by jppersson on September 18, 2008 in Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery.

The Business Impact Analysis, or BIA, is indeed one of the most important steps in implementing a business continuity plan. It identifies and defines what the business considers to be critical (as in business survival) and also what the recovery time objective (RTO) needs to be. The BIA has long been identified as the foundation of planning, as it rightly should be.

The main focus is always on the business. The key business process owners are interviewed and a significant amount of data is collected which eventually ends up as a priority list of business functions (e.g., computer-based applications) to be restored and in what sequence.

In terms of the data center side the BIA process also needs to be reviewed. The technical side of the BIA process involves identifying what operational processes and software are needed to support the restoration of the BIA-identified critical list. This is where the data center and/or operations personnel need to be involved.

For example, what software is needed that end users really don’t know about? Some examples:

  1. Active Directory. This needs to be accounted for during the recovery process.
  2. Back-up/replication programs (Veritas, ArcServ, Mimix, etc) are needed.
  3. VPNs. Are these needed? Do people expect to gain access from alternate locations? Perhaps yes, perhaps no.
  4. Email (as in Exchange). This one, five years ago, was not deemed critical. Today in most companies it now comes to the top. Does the recovery configuration have an Exchange server in the mix?
  5. Job scheduling (as in Robot for the iSeries). This is another case of where the business process owners don’t have input. Nor should they since it is a technical software product, not an end user tool. But, without it nothing runs on a computer.
  6. And more and more…..

Following the completion of the formal BIA it is a very good idea to review the results with data center personnel. Let them identify what is needed to support the identified critical business processes and applications. Be sure to include their requirements in the overall recovery plan.

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A sound Disaster Recovery Plan is essential for any data center. Jan Persson is the author of the  GO.RECOVER-Data Center Template – a powerful yet easy-to-use tool for under $100.

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