RISK MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

Ten steps to a successful business impact analysis

Conducting a business impact analysis (BIA) is hard work and takes time. But once this data is collected, security practitioners can confidently request resources, and more importantly, prioritize security efforts across the enterprise.

Simply stated, BIA is an analytic process that aims to reveal business and operational impacts stemming from any number of incidents or events.

A BIA traditionally leads to a report detailing likely incidents and their related business impact in terms of time and dollars. For example, a BIA report for an online retailer may include a Web site outage of one day with the loss calculated as the yearly gross sales divided by number of days per year the site is open for business.

In order to conduct a BIA you need to understand the business operations of your company in detail. You need to roll up your sleeves and reach out to operational people to get the real picture. We were told of one such exercise from a consulting engagement at a large bank where it was assumed that if the tellers lost their computer terminals that the dollar impact per hour was in the millions. The bank tellers later told that when the terminals aren't available they can continue accepting deposits and other transactions, then manually batch the transactions at the end of the day. There was actually a five- to seven-hour window of no real loss of revenue.

Overcoming the Roadblocks to SOA Success

You're probably running fast to accommodate new customers, new products, new business partners, new technologies, new regulations, and new executive leaders with new strategies and new business models.

Many IT professionals are discussiong Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a mean to overcome the limitations of the existing enterprise systems to be adapted to new business needs.

Composite applications and service-oriented integration enable the development of new solutions from existing applications. In short, they allow companies to do more with what they already have. Additionally, the supporting service-oriented architecture promises to deliver to enterprises the capacity for unprecedented agility. It's a compelling value proposition, but fulfillment of such potential, however, is non-trivial and requires much more than the relatively easy first step of applying Web services veneers on existing applications.

Saragosta has developed a whitepaper together our colleagues at Zystems by Semcon to help our customers better to understand what SOA indeed is and how it may help you to transform your business. 

Please visit our Knowledge Portal to download the whitepaper. Click here for download.

Saragosta Group is the leading expert on legacy transformation and infrastructure solutions in the Polish market. We provide high value counseling, solution design and implementation through a team of highly skilled and experienced Polish and International consultants that bring the best technology and business practices to our clients.

We help companies to understand their challenges and transform this into strategies and solutions that benefit business management and achieves critical competitive advantages.

Contact us for a further dialogue about your issues and how we may support your initiatives.