Info-Tech Research Group 1

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Identify mission critical business activities and applications

Info-Tech Research Group 2

Separate mission critical from merely pervasive or important

When you draw a circle around a system and call it mission critical, that has a significant impact on the time and money needed to support it.

When email or a shared drive goes down, it may impact productivity, but that doesn’t necessarily make it mission critical and justify the cost of higher availability. Ask these questions when identifying mission critical applications:

Questions Description

Is there a hard-dollar impact from downtime?

• For example, when an online ordering system goes down, it impacts sales and therefore revenue.

Impact on goodwill/customer trust?

• If downtime means delays in service delivery or otherwise impacts goodwill, there is an intangible impact on revenue that may make the associated systems mission critical.

Is regulatory compliance a factor?

• Is redundancy and/or high availability required due to legal or regulatory compliance requirements?

Is there a health or safety risk?

• For example, police and medical organizations have systems that are mission critical due to their impact on health and safety rather than revenue or cost. Are there similar considerations in your organization?

Email and other Windows-based applications are important for our day-to-day operations, but they aren’t critical. We can still manufacture and ship clothing without them. However, our manufacturing systems, those are absolutely critical.

– Bob James, Technical Architect, Carhartt, Inc.

Info-Tech Research Group 3

Exercise: Start by identifying mission critical business activities

Whiteboard

• The ultimate goal of DR is to support resumption of normal business activity, so an effective DRP starts with identifying those critical business operations.

What are the most critical business activities (processes, functions, or services) in your organization? What drives revenue or is otherwise mission critical? Below is an example of possible business activities.

Mission Critical Criteria:

1. Is there a hard-dollar impact from downtime?

2. Impact on goodwill/customer trust?

3. Is regulatory compliance a factor?

4. Is there a health or safety risk?

Business Activity Impact on the Business

Sales • Generates revenue.

Manufacturing • Generates product which drives revenue.

Call Center • Drives goodwill and customer loyalty.

HR • Supports and attracts talent pool. However, deficiencies do not cause immediate business impact.

Marketing and Business Development

• Generates customer interest and product demand.

Info-Tech Research Group 4

Worksheet: Mission critical business activities

Business Activity Impact on the Business

Info-Tech Research Group 5

Exercise: Identify the critical applications that support your business activities

Whiteboard

What are the applications necessary for the business activity? For example, for Sales, what applications are critical to account management and selling product? For this exercise, focus on identifying Gold applications.

Example: Applications supporting Sales

Application Impact on the Business*Criticality (Tier)

Online Catalog

• Sales tool and supports the company brand (affects revenue and goodwill).

Gold

CRM • Supports sales, billing, and account mgmt (affects revenue and goodwill).

Gold

Billing System

• Required for invoicing. Note: Important but not critical; does not stop new sales, but delays collecting on existing sales.

Silver

Corporate Website

• Generates sales leads; promotes company brand (affects revenue and goodwill).

Gold

Email • Used in client communications, but is secondary to calling (does not deter sales).

Silver

Inventory System

• Provides pricing and availability information. Required for the Online Catalog application.

Gold*Note: The “Criticality” column at this point is the perceived importance. We’ll conduct a BIA later to refine this assessment.

Info-Tech Research Group 6

Worksheet: Applications

Application Impact on the Business Criticality