Subject: Storage Network Management and Retrieval

Difficulty: Medium.

Marks: 05M

A business impact analysis (BIA) identifies and evaluates financial, operational, and service impacts of a disruption to essential business processes. Selected functional areas are evaluated to determine resilience of the infrastructure to support information availability. The BIA process leads to a report detailing the incidents and their impact over business functions. The impact may be specified in terms of money or in terms of time. Based on the potential impacts associated with downtime, businesses can prioritize and implement countermeasures to mitigate the likelihood of such disruptions. These are detailed in the BC plan.

A BIA includes the following set of tasks:

 Identify the key business processes critical to its operation.

 Determine the attributes of the business process in terms of applications, databases and hardware and software requirements.

 Estimate the costs of failure for each business process.

 Calculate the maximum tolerable outage and define RTO and RPO for each business process.

 Establish the minimum resources required for the operation of business processes.

 Determine recovery strategies and the cost for implementing them.