What is the cost of a business iinterruption?
Four steps that must be taken to determine if a business continuity plan is
worth the investment are listed below. This will allow the organization to
determine real dollar cost per downtime event, calculate acceptable data
recovery points and return to operation goal. This data will then allow an
organization to align itself to a particular disaster recovery organization(s)
skill sets and capabilities.
src="http://www.e-janco.com/images/Order_DRP_BCP.png">
src="http://www.e-janco.com/images/Order_download.png">
src="http://www.e-janco.com/images/Event_Timeline.png" width=508
height=283>
- Conduct a Business Impact Analysis — The first step is to conduct a
business impact analysis. A BIA maps the interdependencies between each system
(physical and virtual), application, and component with each business process
and service provided. Based on the information collected in that process, a
determination can be made on the consequences to the business as a result of
disruption. This analysis should prioritize the importance of each process,
application, and components in terms of cost to the business when they are no
longer accessible. Those costs should include but are not limited to the
following:
1. Lost productivity
2. Lost revenue
3. Complicance
risk
4. Reputation loss - Determine Recovery Time Objective — The next step is to determine the
Recovery Time Objective (RTO). RTO is the amount of time that a business
process must be restored in order to meet Service Level Objectives (SLO) for
the business. Organizations need to meet Recovery Time Objectives in order to
avoid catastrophic consequences when a process or application continues to be
unavailable. While system and component RTOs are important, the application
RTO is what is important to the customer, whether internal or external. The
RTO is established during the Business Impact Analysis portion of the Business
Continuity Plan (BCP). - Determine Recovery Point Objective – Next you need to determine the
Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RPO is the amount of data loss that is
acceptable for a certain time period as part of Business Continuity Planning
(BCP). A certain amount of data loss for some processes is tolerable (i.e. a
data entry clerk types data in manually to process sales orders, if the data
entry clerk keeps the paper files for one day, then the RPO would be 24
hours). Recovery Point Objectives should be carefully planned for each process
and application, as traditional backup and restore methods may not meet
today’s demanding business environments. Snapshot and replication technology
enablers are needed in most environments to meet shrinking RPO time
requirements. Calculate Cost of Downtime per Hour - How Much Does It
Really Cost?
1. Labor cost per employee multiplied by
percentage of employees affected by application or service
interruption.
2. Average revenue per hour multiplied by
percentage of revenue affected by outage.
src="http://www.e-janco.com/images/Order_DRP_BCP.png">
src="http://www.e-janco.com/images/Order_download.png">
Resources
Post Your Resume to 65+ Job Sites
Resume Service
