Start Your Business Continuity Plan With A Business Impact Analysis

As you may have heard, on January 22nd, Online Tech will be holding a half-day business continuity and disaster recovery workshop. Armed with over 60 years of IT experience, the experts we’ve amassed have seen lots of different disaster recovery plans and scenarios. I had an opportunity to speak with Steven Aiello, a Technical Architect and one of the experts we will have on-hand at the workshop, to get a sneak peek of what we’ll be covering in January.

The most pervading sentiment throughout our conversation was the role of business continuity planning throughout the business:

“If there was only one point I would want to reinforce, it’s that business continuance and recovery planning is a business issue, NOT at IT issue. A lot of people treat it as an IT issue, but it permeates throughout the entire company”.

With that in mind, Steven asserts that the beginning of every business continuity plan should be executing a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). A BIA helps to answer a lot of important business questions:

• How do we understand what systems are most important from a business perspective?
• How do we understand how much revenue is generated from these systems?
• What is the real cost of delivering these services?
• Who is responsible for the delivery of these services?

Sometimes things like the ownership of a process isn’t so clear. That’s why the BIA is so important. It also helps define things like what products or services are most profitable, where work is being doubled, or what processes don’t get enough attention.

Within his portion of the workshop, Steven will even have worksheets and other takeaway resources to help you start to execute your own business impact analysis.

If you could benefit from more of Steven Aiello’s sage business continuity planning advice (and really, couldn’t we all?), make sure you pick up your ticket to attend our Indianapolis Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery workshop on our registration page! Along with Steven, We’ll have Lance Thompson, founder and President of Baseline Data Services, as well as Online Tech’s own Director of Infrastructure, Nick Lumsden. Come prepared to ask your disaster recovery questions, and prepare to get some of the best advice experience can buy.

Can’t make it to Indianapolis? We’ve got you covered! We’ll have another workshop in our Metro Detroit data center on February 19th!