Smart Spending on IT DR: Using BIA to Minimize Risk and Costs
This article was previously published by DRJ.
Technology underpins virtually every business process. Whether it’s customer-facing operations like order processing or internal functions like payroll, technology is integral to business continuity. As such, the IT component of your business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plans is a critical priority.
This article explores how organizations can ensure their IT recovery time objectives (RTOs) and disaster recovery (DR) spending align with business needs by leveraging insights from business impact analysis (BIA), addressing challenges in IT asset visibility, and optimizing IT DR processes.
The Role of Business Impact Analysis
At its core, a BIA focuses on understanding and prioritizing business risks and processes. It identifies the operational capabilities critical to a business (also known as critical business functions) and quantifies the financial and operational impact of disruptions to those functions.
From a technology standpoint, this means identifying the dependencies that underpin business processes, quantifying the cost of downtime, and establishing the maximum acceptable duration for recovery. These insights provide a foundation for prioritizing IT DR planning and making informed decisions about resource allocation.
Key Challenges in Aligning IT DR with BIA
Aligning IT DR with business needs is often challenging due to a lack of visibility into IT infrastructure, differing perspectives between IT and business teams, and incomplete mapping of IT assets. Large enterprises typically have highly complex IT environments that combine on-premises and cloud-based systems. Shadow IT, in which tools and systems are adopted without IT oversight, compounds the problem. As a result, most organizations have insight into only about 80% of their IT assets—if that—leaving critical gaps in their understanding.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that IT teams tend to focus on technical assets like servers and devices, while business teams think in terms of operational capabilities and outcomes. This disconnect can hinder effective risk assessments. Traditional asset inventories often fail to account for dependencies, external assets, or dynamic resources like containers. Shared or enterprise-wide infrastructure critical to multiple business functions often lacks clear business-level ownership, leading to incomplete information during IT DR planning. Research shows organizations typically know about only 30% of the infrastructure that supports any given business function.
These gaps make it difficult to determine the appropriate level of backup and recovery solutions needed to meet RTOs and complicate the assessment of cybersecurity risks, which is a separate but related issue.
Costs of IT DR and the Case for Strategic Investment
IT DR costs generally fall into three categories: people costs, technology costs, and downtime costs.
People costs include the time and expertise required to map infrastructure, set up backups, perform testing, and restore systems when outages occur.
Technology costs involve direct expenses for enterprise-grade backup solutions and recovery tools—which can be sizable.
Downtime costs refer to the financial impact of each minute of business disruption.
While it is not feasible for most organizations to enable immediate failover for every system, thoughtful RTO prioritization allows for cost-effective spending. By focusing resources on the infrastructure needed to support the most critical business functions, organizations can minimize downtime costs while ensuring continuity.
Steps to Optimize IT DR Spending and Align with BIA
To address these challenges and optimize IT DR spending, organizations need a structured approach:
1. Create a comprehensive IT asset inventory
Include third-party systems: Many critical business functions rely on third-party services or platforms. Ensure these are part of the inventory.
Capture dynamic assets: Track dynamic components like containers and ephemeral cloud resources.
Ensure completeness: The inventory must encompass every IT asset (IT, OT, IoT) that interacts with others across environments (on-premises, cloud, virtualized, containers). Aggregating data from existing systems is a start, but it’s not enough.
2. Use data-driven automation to map IT assets to business functions
Identify dependencies: Link each IT asset to the business processes it supports, including underlying infrastructure and external components.
Analyze for single points of failure: Identify and address critical dependencies to improve overall resiliency.
3. Establish recovery tiers
Prioritize based on BIA: Use BIA findings to rank business functions by their financial and operational impact.
Set tiered RTOs: Assign recovery priorities and timeframes to each tier.
4. Choose and implement appropriate DR solutions
Align solutions with recovery tiers: Select backup and recovery tools capable of meeting RTOs for each tier.
Go beyond data backup: Include infrastructure and systems required to support recovery.
Seek expert input: Leverage analyst reports and peer feedback to evaluate solutions.
5. Test and document your DR plan
Conduct full-scale testing: Regularly test the entire DR plan to ensure it meets RTOs for all business functions.
Document results: Share test outcomes with stakeholders and auditors to demonstrate preparedness.
6. Maintain and update continuously
Track changes: Keep the IT asset inventory and business function mappings up to date.
Adjust DR plans as needed: Ensure recovery solutions remain aligned with evolving business needs.
The Benefits of Aligning IT DR with BIA
Aligning IT DR spending with BIA insights offers several advantages. It minimizes downtime costs by concentrating efforts on the most critical business functions, improves resiliency by addressing single points of failure, and demonstrates compliance with regulatory requirements, particularly in industries such as financial services. A well-aligned IT DR strategy builds organizational confidence by showing stakeholders the business is prepared for disruptions.
Conclusion
By developing a comprehensive understanding of IT assets, mapping them to business functions, and establishing tiered recovery priorities, organizations can optimize their DR investments while ensuring business continuity.
When the next outage occurs, this meticulous planning will pay off, minimizing downtime, controlling costs, and protecting the business from significant disruptions.
Interested in learning more?
