The DR/BC industry is on a constant crusade to Simplify! The traditional BIA is never far behind. Unfortunately, the crusade is founded on a false belief…that DR/BC planning can be simplified by reducing or eliminating the details. We believe this grail search is naïve at best, and potentially catastrophic at worst. We believe that the “devil is in the details” and that artificially simplifying those details puts your recoverability at risk.
A thorough, traditional BIA might define RTO, RPO, recovery tier, recovery group, recovery impact and, if you are lucky, maybe a couple of other data points. Unfortunately, 70 or 80 data points are required for an optimal recovery! (That’s required, not nice-to-have.) Even if only 20 or 30 of those data points were required, where does the traditional BIA leave you? What do you do when your BIA doesn’t define internal and external / upstream and downstream dependencies? Or, what happens when your BIA overlooked the priority changes and additional resources needed to address your once-per-year worst-case priority. And how would you conduct your process when your third-party inputs were interrupted if your BIA didn’t take the time to identify viable alternative sources?
Instead of ignoring or avoiding the details, why not find a way to define them and manage them that takes no more effort but which produces a far superior result. Why not use a methodology that defines 10 or 12 times the data points of a traditional BIA in less than half the time with twice the accuracy?
Why not really simplify the BIA and concurrently simplify your recovery planning and your actual recovery?
It’s time to dump the traditional BIA!
