Project Part 4: Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

Senior management at Health Network has decided they want a business impact analysis (BIA) that examines the company’s data center and a business continuity plan (BCP). Because of the importance of risk management to the organization, management has allocated all funds for both efforts. Your team has their full support, as well as permission to contact any of them directly for participation or inclusion in the BIA or BCP.

Winter storms on the East Coast have affected the ability of Health Network employees to reach the Arlington offices in a safe and timely manner. However, no BCP plan currently exists to address corporate operations. The Arlington office is the primary location for business units, such as Finance, Legal, and Customer Support. Some of the corporate systems, such as the payroll and accounting applications, are located only in the corporate offices. Each corporate location is able to access the other two, and a remote virtual private network (VPN) exists between each production data center and the corporate locations.

The corporate systems are not currently being backed up and should be addressed in the new plan. The BCP should also include some details regarding how the BCP will be tested.

For this part of the project:

Research BIAs and BCPs.

Develop a draft BIA plan for the Health Network that focuses on the data center. The BIA should identify:

1. Critical business functions
2. Critical resources

Maximum acceptable outage (MAO) and impact

1. Recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)
2. Develop a draft BCP that could recover business operations while efforts are ongoing to restart previous operations. You may use or repurpose a BCP template you find online. Include a description of how you would test the plan.