KingsBridge Blog

In this second of the Phoenix for SharePoint Feature of the Week series we are excited to share with you just how easy it is to work through a Business Impact Analysis process. This process will allow you to quickly define how vulnerable your organization is to threats through a Threat Risk Assessment exercise that will document the recovery of your most important business processes.

Phoenix for SharePoint provides a singular BIA facility that will guide you through the process and while doing so allow you to document both the conclusions and the recovery processes that will help ensure that your organization is back in business quickly and efficiently.

The BIA landing page says it all. Through this section of the Phoenix for SharePoint solution you will perform the TRA and BIA assessments of your organization’s readiness to recover from a disaster. There are six steps in the process.

Step 1: The Threat Risk Assessment

Identifying potential threats specific to an organization is the first step to creating a recovery plan. The Threat Risk Analysis helps identify what threats are relevant to your organization, and what risk it is to your people, your buildings, and the continuity of your business. These threats have been grouped into the following categories:

Natural Threats – caused by the environment

Human Threats – caused by individuals actions

Technical Threats – caused by equipment or technology failure

Step 2: Business Unit Teams

The most effective way to an orderly and timely recovery is to establish teams based on the organizations Business Unit structure. It is important that the teams be established, and tasks identified to be done before, during and after a disaster. During an emergency each team member contributes the skills that they use in their everyday work to the overall response. Each team identified in this section will be required to complete a Business Impact Analysis Survey to identify the business processes that are most crucial to the operations of the organization.

Step 3: Team Business Processes

In this section you will identify all of the business processes that will require recovery and assign them to a Business Unit Team. The Business Unit Team will be responsible for defining how the business process assigned to them will function during an IT outage and the procedures required to restore the systems required to support it.

Step 4: Surveys

One of the basic assumptions behind the BIA is that every component of the organization is reliant upon the continued functioning of every other component, but some are more critical than others. This BIA tool will be used to identify each department’s critical business processes, the maximum tolerable outages, and the resources required to complete each specific function.

For each Business Process identified and associated with a Business Unit Team a Business Process Survey is created. The Business Process Survey is emailed to Team Leader for auctioning and delegation to other team members.

When you click on the Business Process Survey item you are provided with two options. Respond to the survey or view the responses.

The Business Process Survey is designed to help you determine which business processes are the most important ones and also what is the process for performing it without access to the IT systems and the recovery process for the IT systems that the business processes depend upon. When you click on “Respond to this Survey” you are provided with an extensive questionnaire to identify the business process, its importance, and the required elements to recover it within the desired recovery window.

The following two screen images highlight the business process survey questionnaire. Please note that the survey questions can be edited and changed depending on your organization’s requirements for conducting a BIA/TRA process.

Step 5: Preview BIA Plan

Step 5 provides you with an opportunity to review the BIA/TRA results before you publish them. It shows you the BIA/TRA plan results from all of the Business Unit Teams and Business Processes survey results before they are actually published in final form. Simply click on Publish BIA Report button and you will produce a dynamically compiled version of the final BIA/TRA published plan.

Step 6: Published Reports

And this is what the final published plan looks like in PDF form.

But wait, there is more!

When a new BIA/TRA plan is published all of the participants to the BIA Published Plans folder can receive an update notification via email or SMS or our own Phoenix iPhone and BlackBerry Mobile Apps.

Within the Alert Me option the Phoenix for SharePoint plan contributor can select to receive plan update alerts by email or SMS text messages.

When any new BIA/TRA plans are published all of the people that are involved will automatically receive the plan update notification.

About KingsBridge

KingsBridge offers private businesses and government organizations a unique combination of industry knowledge and cost-effective disaster recovery / business continuity solutions. KingsBridge products and seminars provide the tools to assess possible threats and create tailored plans which mitigate risks and minimize losses in the event of a disruption to business. KingsBridge is headquartered in Ogdensburg, New York, with an office in Ottawa, Canada. For more information visit us at www.DisasterRecovery.com.