Modern business is facing a rapidly evolving and growing threat landscape, what does this mean for your business? That means more risks with increased frequency, diversity, complexity, severity and potential business impact.
The real question is, “How do we tackle these rising threats?” The answer lies in having a robust BCDR strategy. However, to build a solid BCDR plan, you must first perform a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Read on to learn what BIA is and how it shapes the foundations of an effective BCDR strategy.
What is BIA?
BIA is a structured approach to identifying and assessing the operational impact of inter-sectoral disruptions. Several factors can lead to destructive incidents or emergencies, including cyberattacks, natural disasters, and supply chain issues.
Implementing a BIA allows you to identify key features for running and survival of your business. Companies can use BIA insights to develop strategies and first resume these capabilities to maintain core services in the event of a crisis.
It informs you of key priorities such as RTO/RPO SLAs and adjusts technical capabilities proportional to the level of threats and risks that are critical to continuity and recovery plans.
The role of IT leaders to enable effective BIA
Business continuity, risk, or compliance teams often lead business impact analysis, but IT leaders play a key role in making it work. It brings critical visibility into system dependencies and infrastructure across your organization. They provide valuable insight into what is technically feasible when a disaster occurs. IT leaders also play a key role in verifying their recovery commitments, whether they are able to meet their set RTO and RPO goals within their current infrastructure or need to upgrade.
IT leaders operate their recovery strategies with the right tools, from selecting and configuring DR tools to automating the failover process. This ensures that your recovery plan is viable and ready to be integrated into your day-to-day operations, tested and expanded into your business.
In SMB or IT-led organizations, BIAs often leads when needed. With a sensual view of operations, infrastructure and business continuity, IT leaders are positioned independently to drive BIA.
Pro Tip: Involvement ensures that BIA is not just a business document. It’s a practical recovery plan.
Identifying threat vectors
Before you can protect what’s important, you need to understand what threatens it. Assess the threat landscape facing your organization and adjusts your response plans based on industry, geographical risks and operational profiles.
The important threat vectors to consider are:
CyberThreats: From ransomware to insider threats and qualification compromises, cyber attacks are becoming more complex, frequency and severity. One weakness of defense systems can lead to massive data loss and operational downtime. Natural Disasters: Events such as hurricanes, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, and other attack quickly and violently. The impact of these events can ripple across the region and lead to disruption to supply chains, data centers and physical offices. Disruption: Unexpected outages due to power outages, software bugs, or network downtime can cause daily operations to be suspended if they are not ready. Accidental deletion or incorrect collection can lead to costly downtime. Regulation and compliance risk: Data breaches and data loss can not only damage your business financially, but also lead to legal issues and non-compliance.
Figure 1: Analysis of the impact of various threats
Industry-specific risks
All sectors operate in their own way, relying on different systems to maintain and run. Certain threats can interfere with these systems and core functions more than others. Below are some examples to guide you in identifying and prioritizing threats based on industry.
health care
When operating in the healthcare sector, ransomware and system availability must be a top priority as disruption and downtime can directly affect patient care and safety. As regulations like HIPAA become more stringent, data protection and privacy become important to meet compliance requirements.
education
Phishing and account compromise attacks targeting staff and students are common in the education sector. Furthermore, the rise of hybrid learning environments has expanded the threat surface, spreading across student endpoints, SAAS platforms and on-premises servers. To make the problem more difficult, many agencies operate with limited IT staff and resources, making them more vulnerable to human error, slow threat detection, and delayed response times.
Manufacturing and Logistics
In manufacturing and logistics, operational technology (OT) uptime is mission-critical as downtime caused by power failure, network outages or system destruction causes production lines to be stopped and delayed delivery. Unlike traditional IT environments, many OT systems are not easily backed up or virtualized and require specific DR considerations. Additionally, disruptions in just-in-time (JIT) supply chains can slow inventory, increase costs, and put vendor relationships at risk.
When building the BIA threat matrix, score by chance and impact of gaining each threat.
What is the possibility that this will happen in the next 1-3 years? If that happens, which systems, people, and business functions will affect you? Can this threat create a cascade failure?
Prioritization helps focus recovery resources when the risk is highest and the cost of downtime is the highest.
Run BIA
Follow these steps to implement your BIA to strengthen your recovery strategy.
1. Identify and list important business features
Knowing what’s most important to your business survival is important to designing an effective BCDR plan that aligns with your business requirements.
Work with department heads to identify key business features and associate them with the IT assets, apps, and services that support them.
2. Assess the impact of downtime
Downtime can have a serious or mild impact on business operations, depending on the duration.
It is important to assess the results across revenue, compliance, productivity and reputation. Classifies business functions by impact severity (high, medium, low).
3. Define RTO and RPO
RTO and RPO are important benchmarks that define the speed at which a system needs to be restored and the amount of data that organizational loss can withstand.
Establish it in collaboration with business and technical teams.
RTO: Maximum allowable downtime. RPO: Maximum permissible data loss.
4. System and data prioritization
If unexpected things happen, being able to recover quickly will help maintain business continuity and minimize downtime risk.
Create backup and recovery plans by linking impact tiers with assets and applications that rely on.
5. Document Dependencies
Documenting dependencies between business functions and IT systems is important to understand the important links between them, ensure accurate impact assessments, and drive effective recovery plans.
Includes infrastructure, SAAS tools, third-party integrations, and interdependent apps.
Turn insights into action with Datto BCDR
A well-executed BIA lays the foundation for a resilient recovery response organization. Provides important data for making risk-based, cost-effective decisions. While BIA provides valuable insight into recovery goals, dependencies and risk, Dutt transforms these insights into automated, repeatable recovery actions.
Datto offers a unified platform for backup, disaster recovery, ransomware detection, business continuity, and disaster recovery orchestration. It provides policy-based backups and can be used to assign backup frequency and retention using RTO and RPO survey results. Create critical backup schedules to enhance data protection, optimize resources and costs, and ensure fast, targeted recovery.
Datto’s reverse chain technology and image-based backup maximize recovery performance by storing all previous recovery points in a separate, fully built state on a Datto device or on a Datto cloud, while reducing the footprint of your storage. Simplify backup chain management and speed up recovery.
Datto 1-Clock Disaster Recovery lets you test and define Dr Runbooks in Datro Cloud that can be run in a single click.
Whether you’re protecting data stored on your endpoint, SaaS platform, or on-premises servers, Datto covers it. Periodically verify the recovery configuration using screenshots and test results, and use test automation to ensure that the RTO is met under actual conditions.
Datto detects abnormal file modification behavior to protect backups and prevent them from being corrupted by ransomware. Seamlessly integrates with BCDR workflows to support quick recovery to pre-attack states.
In a rapidly changing business environment where threats are becoming more and operational downtime is not an option, resilience is your competitive advantage. BIA is your map and datt is your car.
Get customized Dut BCDR prices today. Discover how our solutions can help you stay operational and safe, regardless of the situation.
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