Performing a Business Impact Analysis for an IT Infrastructure

Performing a Business Impact Analysis for an IT Infrastructure

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Performing a Business Impact Analysis for an IT Infrastructure

1. A business impact analysis (BIA) is a planning strategy that identifies potential vulnerabilities and minimizes them. It entails predicting potential risks and developing recovery strategies within the organization over long periods. Therefore, it highlights the implications of disruption of business functions and processes like increased expenditure, delayed payments and customer dissatisfaction.
2. Business impact analysis gives a clear relationship between the impact of the possible risk and the time duration; therefore, providing a basis for the formulation of a recovery strategy. This enables prioritizing of objectives and appropriate measures that can be taken within the necessary timeframes.
3. Risk assessment and risk management help in determining the value of the asset base of the IT infrastructure, a move that helps to prioritize in the event there is a potential destructive hazard that leads to losses. This ensures there is a proper plan in replacing the assets that could be destroyed.
4. It is true. The differences between the two times will lead to permanent data loss as the system will not have recovered enough to allow recovery of the objective points.
5. What are the objectives of the organization? What are the deliverables of the organization? What resources do these deliverables require?
6. The business continuity planning (BCP) helps prevent risk occurrence by predicting possible threats that are associated with the infrastructure. This helps in preventing losses within the organization thus building resilience to probable threats and increase IT efficiency.
7. The risks that BCP helps mitigate are operational risks. These are risks associated with external factors on the current running of an IT firm. Other risks include those of malfunctioning of physical components like computer hardware and network cables, processes, business functions, malicious attacks from software or sabotage by other IT companies and power disruption over long periods.
8. BCP development is crucial irrespective of having liability and asset replacement insurance. Insurance claims reimbursement take long, and this may lead to recovery time objective (RTO) being longer than recovery point objective (RPO). This means that there will be a lot of unrecoverable data loss as the systems are replaced. There will be losses experienced within the organization, which could have been averted by a carrying out a BCP. This ensures that actual and potential risks are addressed.
9. A BIA forms the basis for a BCP. It is thorough identification, recording, analyzing testing implementation then finally recommending the best solutions. It provides the rationale for the formation of continuity methods by giving the relationship between the magnitudes of impact against the time of disruption. It is from this process that priorities of the objectives are drawn.
10. All members of staff are meant to be considered in taking part of the BCP planning considering the movement from centralized processing to client/server distributed computing.
11. Disaster planning and disaster recovery belong in BCP because it is through this risk analysis that the potential hazards to the infrastructure are identified. The BCP, therefore, helps to account for scenarios that involve disaster and provide an elaborate description of how to deal with the threat. The two work hand in hand in ensuring that actual risks and potential ones are addressed appropriately.
12.  The importance of having a documented IT recovery system is to ensure that, in the event of change in staff or personnel, someone will be available to address the threat as all the information is readily available. Online back up alone is risky as in the event of power disruptions system recovery will not occur.
13. Testing the BCP gives critical information like, how long it takes for the system to recover, what are the possible errors in the plan that can be identified and dealt with as soon as possible and how robust the system is. This ensures that the company is operational at all times and helps reduce recovery time.
14. BCP should be updated at least after every 6 months. This way, the organization remains relevant and current. It is also advisable that it is updated every time there is a change in the organization to help prevent threats caused by system changeovers.