Point-Of-Failure Analysis

Objective
Not long ago, the recovery industry’s mantra was “you can’t prevent a disaster so you better be prepared to recover from one”. Most companies and recovery vendors still subscribe to this philosophy even though recent technologies and solutions have fundamentally rewritten this old rule.

Over 80% of recorded disasters have been caused by preventable outages. And while prevention is still an exercise in cost-benefit trade-offs, new technologies and mutli-tiered recovery architectures make prevention more attractive and more achievable than ever before.

Given this new availability of legitimate, cost-effective preventative measures, it only makes sense to consider re-allocating funds from recovery to continuity. And although few businesses can justify the expense of completely eliminating all potential exposures, risk can be dramatically reduced by identifying your exposures and critical points-of-failure and systematically addressing them. Consider the effect on your fundamental recovery planning assumptions and strategies if 80% – 90% of potential impacts could be eliminated. Your focus changes, your spending can be reallocated, your recovery plan documents are simplified and your resources are freed from “firefighting” activities.

Format
WTG’s Point-of Failure Analysis helps businesses understand the geographical, physical, operational, system and data exposures that may impact a company’s ability to conduct business. The Point-of-Failure Analysis is an “outward” review of all of the exposures inherent in your environment and serves as an indicator of where additional recovery/continuity planning efforts are required. By contrast, our Current Preparedness Review (CPR) is an “inward” analysis of all of the preventive elements of your recovery/continuity capability. That is, an analysis of the results of your recovery/continuity planning efforts to ensure that they adequately support your stated recovery objectives. A Point-of Failure Analysis can be used by itself to proactively reduce your company’s exposures or in conjunction with CPR to additionally validate the effectiveness of your planning efforts.

Our specialists spend three to five days on-site at your company to evaluate all aspects of your end-to-end operating environment. They examine your geographical location; site construction; power sources; hardware, software and communications infrastructure; security and fire prevention systems; application architectures and data readiness to discover critical points of potential failure that could cause business interruption.

Then, we prepare a detailed report that ranks points of failure by impact and risk (likelihood) and include recommendations for reducing or eliminating the exposures. The report also indicates which exposures should be addressed immediately and which can be deferred and leveraged with future initiatives for maximum cost-effectiveness. The report provides company management with a roadmap for proactive disaster prevention and serves as a long-term baseline for continuous improvement.