Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2025

Smart Spending on IT DR: Using BIA to Minimize

standing and prioritizing business risks and processes. It identifies the operational capabilities critical to a business (also known as critical business functions) and quantifies the financial and operational impact of disruptions to those functions. From a technology standpoint, this means identifying the dependencies that underpin business processes, quantify ing the cost of downtime, and establish ing the maximum acceptable duration for recovery. These insights provide a founda tion for prioritizing IT DR planning and making informed decisions about resource allocation. Key Challenges in Aligning IT DR with BIA Aligning IT DR with business needs is often challenging due to a lack of visibility into IT infrastructure, differing perspec tives between IT and business teams, and incomplete mapping of IT assets. Large enterprises typically have highly complex IT environments that combine on-prem ises and cloud-based systems. Shadow IT,

Risk and Costs By GREG VIRGIN T echnology underpins vir tually every business process. Whether it’s cus tomer-facing operations like order processing or internal functions like pay roll, technology is integral to business continuity. As such, the IT component of your business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plans is a critical priority.

This article explores how organizations can ensure their IT recovery time objec tives (RTOs) and disaster recovery (DR) spending align with business needs by leveraging insights from business impact analysis (BIA), addressing challenges in IT asset visibility, and optimizing IT DR processes. The Role of Business Impact Analysis At its core, a BIA focuses on under

24 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2025