Assess impact categories and dependencies of a process
Assess the different components of a business impact analysis (BIA). First by assessing and determining the impact categories of a business process. Second, by identifying any underlying dependencies that the business process requires across different dependency types.
Before you begin
Procedure
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Click the lists icon (
).
By default the records in the In Draft state of the Business Impact Analysis list opens. -
To update an existing BIA, click the link to the record in the
Name column.
You can view different cards that give the information on the impact assessment result, its progress, and the dependencies of the business process on business application, hardware, software, or vendors.
Figure 1. BIA impact assessment and dependency views - Impact Assessment Result
This card provides the assessment results of the recovery tier level and the recovery time objective for the item that is assessed.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Metric that evaluates the data loss during the business disruption duration that can exceed the tolerance level. RPO results appear in the Impact Assessment Result card only when the primary element assessed in the BIA requires data backup. Otherwise the card shows only the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and recovery tier results.
- Recovery Time Objective: Metric that calculates how quickly the business must recover an element or an item after a disruption. RTO is measured in terms of how long your business can survive following a disaster before operations are restored to normalcy. If the RTO is four hours and the item recovered is beyond four hours, then your business could suffer quite some loss.
- Recovery Tier: Organizations differ in defining recovery tiers depending on the item and the time by which it should be recovered on the state of a crisis. A recovery time objective of Immediately, 1 hour, or 4 hours is impending and falls within the Mission Critical recovery tier level. On the other hand, an RTO of two weeks to one month can be graded as a Non-Essential recovery tier, which may not incur considerable loss to the business.
Note:You can configure the mapping of recovery tiers to RTOs as per your requirement.Figure 2. Impact assessment result - Impact Assessment Progress
This component indicates the categories of impact that you have assessed and completed in relation to the categories that are assessment pending. As you complete the assessment for each category of impact, you can see the progress of the Impact Assessment Progress ribbon component. The color-coded ribbon component prompts you to complete the assessment for the pending impact categories.
Figure 3. Impact assessment progress component - Dependent Assessment Progress
Identifies the dependency of the business process on different asset classes or types for its functioning. The assessment identifies the relationship between the business process and the business application, software, workplaces, or vendors. Or, the asset types that the process uses. The progress of the dependency assessment pie chart advances as you complete assessing the business applications, software or hardware, and vendors that the business process depends on.
Figure 4. Dependency assessment progress pie chart - BIA SLA
The business impact analysis also requires a specific time by which the assessment of a business process must be completed. By default, the SLA timer is set to 30 days and it marks the time since the BIA is drafted, which is In Draft state, until the time it is complete, which is Approved state.
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To review the dependency groups and identify the items within each group that
your business process depends on, click the Dependency
Assessment tab.
You can prioritize your business continuity and recovery plans based on the criticality of the assets that your business process utilizes. For more information, see: Identify dependent items to prioritize recovery plans.
- Order of impact categories
- The order in which the impact categories appear in the RTO Impact Assessment, RPO Impact Assessment, and Dependency Assessment tabs depend on the
order in which the impact categories are created in the template that is used in the BIA.
The order of impact rating in the RTO impact assessment grid and the order of the questions in the RPO impact assessment grid are defined by the impact rating scale and the impact analysis questions in the BIA, respectively. However, any user who can access the BIA can change the order of the RPO impact grid, RTO impact categories, and dependency groups.
- Columns in dependency group grid
- If you had set up column configurations for an element of a dependency group and enabled your grid configuration as active, then you can view those columns in the dependency grid for the corresponding dependency group in which element definition matches with the grid configuration element definition. Otherwise, you can view the grid that is rendered based on the configured view; that is either IT asset or non-IT asset view based on the required data backup value of the dependency group.
Figure 5. Grid columns for dependency assessment Figure 6. Grid configuration setup For ad hoc reporting of variables created for dependency: Add the columns in Dependency report source [sn_bia_dependency_report_source] table to match the variables that you defined in Element variable where the Enable reporting option is set to true. A scheduled job that runs weekly retrieves the dependencies (sn_bia_dependency), where the impact analysis is in approved state, updated in the last seven days, and has not expired, and the corresponding element and updates the data in the reporting table. To display the columns that you require you must set up the element variable and grid configuration. For more information, see, Grid configuration for column display.