Modern businesses face a rapidly evolving and expanding threat landscape, but what does this mean for your business? It means a growing number of risks, along with an increase in their frequency, variety, complexity, severity, and potential business impact.
The real question is, “How do you tackle these rising threats?” The answer lies in having a robust BCDR strategy. However, to build a rock-solid BCDR plan, you must first conduct a business impact analysis (BIA). Read on to learn what BIA is and how it forms the foundation of an effective BCDR strategy.
What Is a BIA?
A BIA is a structured approach to identifying and evaluating the operational impact of disruptions across departments. Disruptive incidents or emergencies can occur due to several factors, such as cyberattacks, natural disasters or supply chain issues.
Conducting a BIA helps identify critical functions for a business’s operations and survival. Businesses can use insights from BIA to develop strategies to resume those functions first to maintain core services in the event of a crisis.
It informs key priorities, such as RTO/RPO SLAs, and aligns technological capabilities proportionally with the level of threat and risk, which are critical for continuity and recovery planning.
The IT Leader’s Role in Enabling an Effective BIA
While business continuity, risk, or compliance teams often lead business impact analysis, IT leaders play a crucial role in making it work. They bring critical visibility into system dependencies and infrastructure across the organization. They provide valuable insights into what’s technically feasible when disaster strikes. IT leaders also play a key part in validating recovery commitments, whether the set RTO and RPO goals can be achieved within the current infrastructure, or if upgrades are needed.
IT leaders operationalize the recovery strategy with appropriate tooling, from selecting and configuring DR tools to automating failover processes. This helps ensure the recovery plan is executable, integrated into everyday operations, tested and ready to scale with the business.
In SMBs or IT-led orgs, IT often leads the BIA by necessity. Because of their cross-functional view of operations, infrastructure and business continuity, IT leaders are uniquely positioned to drive the BIA.
Pro Tip: IT’s involvement ensures the BIA isn’t just a business document; it becomes an actionable recovery plan.
Identifying Threat Vectors
Before you can protect what matters, you must understand what threatens it. Assess the threat landscape facing your organization and tailor your response plan based on industry, geographic risk and operational profile.
Here are the key threat vectors to consider:
- Cyberthreats: From ransomware to insider threats and credential compromise, cyberattacks are growing in complexity, frequency and severity. One weak point in your defense systems can lead to massive data loss and operational downtime.
- Natural Disasters: Events like hurricanes, wildfires, floods and earthquakes strike fast and hard. The effects of these events can ripple across regions, disrupting supply chains, data centers and physical offices.
- Operational Disruptions: Unexpected outages due to power failure, software bugs or network downtime can bring daily operations to a grinding halt if you aren’t prepared.
- Human Error: Anyone, including your best employees, can make mistakes. Accidental deletions or misconfigurations can lead to costly downtime.
- Regulatory and Compliance Risks: Data breaches and data loss can not only hurt your business financially but also lead to legal issues and compliance violations.
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| Fig 1: Impact analysis of different threats |
Industry-specific risks
Every sector operates in its own unique way and relies on different systems to stay up and running. Certain threats can hinder those systems and core functions more than others. Here are a few examples to guide you in identifying and prioritizing threats based on industry.
Healthcare
If you operate in the healthcare sector, ransomware and system availability must be your top priorities since any disruption or downtime can directly impact patient care and safety. As regulations like HIPAA get more stringent, data protection and privacy become critical to meet compliance requirements.
Education
Phishing and account compromise attacks targeting staff and students are common in the education sector. Additionally, the rise of hybrid learning environments has expanded the threat surface, stretching across student endpoints, SaaS platforms and on-premises servers. To make matters more challenging, many institutions operate with limited IT staff and resources, making them more vulnerable to human error, slower 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 failures, network outages or system disruptions can halt production lines and delay deliveries. Unlike traditional IT environments, many OT systems aren’t easily backed up or virtualized, requiring specific DR considerations. Moreover, any disruption to just-in-time (JIT) supply chains can delay inventory, increase costs and jeopardize vendor relationships.
As you build your BIA threat matrix, score each threat by likelihood and impact:
- What’s the chance this will occur in the next one to three years?
- If it happens, what systems, people and business functions will it affect?
- Can this threat create a cascading failure?
Prioritization helps you focus recovery resources where the risk is highest and the cost of downtime is greatest.
Running the BIA
Follow these steps to conduct a BIA to strengthen your recovery strategy:
1. Identify and List Critical Business Functions
Knowing what matters most for your business’s survival is critical for designing effective BCDR plans that align with your business requirements.
- Work with department heads to identify critical business functions and associate them with the IT assets, apps and services that support them.
2. Assess the Impact of Downtime
Downtime, depending on the duration, can severely or mildly impact business operations.
- It’s important to evaluate the consequences across revenue, compliance, productivity and reputation.
- Categorize business functions by impact severity (e.g., high, medium, low).
3. Define RTOs and RPOs
RTOs and RPOs are critical benchmarks that define how quickly your systems must be restored and how much data loss your organization can endure.
Work with business and technical teams to establish:
- RTO: Maximum acceptable downtime.
- RPO: Maximum acceptable data loss.
4. Prioritize Systems and Data
When the unexpected occurs, being able to recover quickly can help maintain business continuity and minimize downtime risks.
- Create a backup and recovery plan by linking impact tiers with IT assets and applications they rely on.
5. Document Dependencies
Documenting dependencies between business functions and IT systems is important to understand the critical links between them, ensure accurate impact assessments and drive effective recovery planning.
- Include 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-ready organization. It provides the essential data to make risk-based, cost-effective decisions. While BIA offers valuable insights into recovery objectives, dependencies and risks, Datto turns those insights into automated, repeatable recovery actions.
Datto provides a unified platform for backup, disaster recovery, ransomware detection, business continuity and disaster recovery orchestration. It offers policy-based backups, allowing you to use RTO and RPO findings to assign backup frequency and retention. You can create tiered backup schedules based on criticality to strengthen data protection, optimize resources and costs, and ensure fast, targeted recovery.
Datto’s Inverse Chain Technology and image-based backups reduce storage footprint while maximizing recovery performance by storing every previous recovery point in an independent, fully constructed state on the Datto device or the Datto cloud. They simplify backup chain management and speed up recovery.
Datto 1-Click Disaster Recovery lets you test and define DR runbooks in the Datto Cloud that are executable with just a single click.
Whether you are protecting data stored on endpoints, SaaS platforms or on-premises servers, Datto has you covered. It regularly validates recovery configurations with screenshots and test results, and uses test automation to verify that you meet RTOs under real conditions.
Datto detects abnormal file change behavior to protect your backups and prevent them from being corrupted by ransomware. It seamlessly integrates with BCDR workflows to support rapid recovery to the pre-attack state.
In a fast-changing business environment where threats loom large and operational downtime isn’t an option, resilience is your competitive advantage. The BIA is your map, and Datto is your vehicle.
Get customized Datto BCDR pricing today. Discover how our solutions help you stay operational and secure, regardless of the circumstances.
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