WTG’s alternative to the traditional Business Impact Analysis (BIA) does everything a BIA does—but it does it faster, less expensively, more accurately and with less impact on your staff. More importantly, our IBPD identifies mission critical processes, upstream and downstream dependencies, recovery requisites, Inherent Criticalities™, Resultant Criticalities™, Need/Need+/Need- solutions, Riser Warnings™, Break Points™, Acceptable Risk Points™ and other key NextGen Level 2 data that traditional BIAs don’t even acknowledge exist. Without this data, it is impossible to design the most proportionate and operationally-effective recovery solutions.

The IBPD focuses on business process analysis and borrows techniques from process modeling disciplines to quickly create an accurate view of your critical applications and business process flows. It then becomes a relatively simple effort to map the critical processes to applications and, ultimately, to infrastructure hardware and other recovery requisites. The advantage of the IBPD over a traditional BIA is that we arrive at the RTO and RPO by understanding workflow interactions, as opposed to forcing relatively abstract estimates of loss.

Our IBPD tool simplifies the process dramatically while concurrently improving accuracy because it “calculates” many of the answers automatically. The entire process usually takes less than 10 minutes per business process even though much more granular information is revealed compared to a traditional approach. It’s the best of both worlds…the accuracy and effectiveness of individual interviews with the speed and simplicity of an automated tool.

While the coarse estimates arrived at with a BIA are usually sufficient for typical planning efforts, a much more accurate view is required to define the absolute smallest recovery footprint and to achieve the correspondingly smallest expense outlay. The IBPD is the ideal foundation for all continuity planning efforts and defines the capability required in terms business decision-makers can understand. It also serves as a permanent benchmark for future application development, system integration, training and business process improvement initiatives and becomes a functioning part of your recovery plan at time of disaster.