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There are ample reasons as to why assessing the criticality Assessing vulnerability of each process allows
of your processes will aid in developing a DR solution the prediction of potential threats to the
suitable to the business. Firstly, defining the mission critical overall continuity of a business and increases
processes will allow your DR solution to assign priorities the effectiveness of a DR solution due to these
for the recovery process and get the business back online vulnerabilities being built into the plan. Threats are
while staying within your RTO and RPO to ensure typically broken down into two main categories,
impacts are staying within the parameters of minimal internal or external.
acceptable loss. Second, identifying dependencies within
processes will also ensure proper recovery order. As a External threats are typically natural or man-made
result, you will be able to appropriately assign priorities disasters such as storms and earthquakes and are
to dependent processes so they can function properly in an indirect threat to the BCP (business continuity
the event of a disaster. Cloud Endure research shows that plan). While external options usually don’t specifically
77% of surveyed companies had an availability goal of 99.9% target a business, they still have the capability to cause
which equates to approximately 8.7 hours of downtime a significant disruption. Internal threats are events
annually. that don’t happen on a large scale and occur within a
business, such as hardware failure and file corruption.
Ensuring the recovery of information and processes is done
as efficiently as possible due to setting these priorities will Data from the Strategic Research Corporation
drastically increase the effectiveness of the DR solution shows that approximately 44% of disruptions are
you have in place, thus minimizing down-time. Failure to do caused by hardware failure, making it the leading
so runs the risk implementing a recovery solution that will cause of disruption in business continuity. A complete
recover non-crucial data before critical data, thus delaying risk assessment ensures the vulnerabilities of the
the recovery of the business, and in turn increasing the loss processes are being appropriately planned for within
of data and financial damages of a possible disaster. your solution.

64 Return to TOC True North RESILIENCE magazine - Spring 2023