What is Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)?
It’s been three decades since computing became indispensable to modern business.
Back in 1990,...
As businesses increase the use of mobility and internal and external threat vectors unceasingly pose a risk to business disruption, it’s imperative to ask the question: What critical business processes are being done with mobile endpoints? Once defined, it’s prudent to go a step further and conduct a business impact analysis, or BIA, to operate at peak performance in an expanding mobile environment.
According to Gartner, a business impact analysis (BIA) is the process of determining the criticality of business activities and associated resource requirements to ensure operational resilience and continuity of operations during and after a business disruption. The BIA quantifies the impacts of disruptions on service delivery, risks to service delivery, and recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). These recovery requirements are then used to develop strategies, solutions and plans.
More and more, as users leverage mobility to perform their jobs, it’s vital to conduct a BIA, not only to manage your business best but also to support IT Modernization initiatives directly. Here are three tips to start the BIA process.
3 Tips to Start the BIA Process
- Think Holistically
End to end, it’s imperative to think holistically about your business and how employees are using their mobile devices. The goal is to have the right data to determine what’s necessary to operate your business.
- Perform a Business Process Classification
Certain processes, costs and people are required to prevent a negative impact to your business. The process classification framework (PCF) by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) – the world’s foremost authority in benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement, and knowledge management – enables you to group processes; and consequentially, develop a business continuity plan (BCP) to help mitigate risk in case of a disaster or other potential business interferences.
- Conduct a Technology Assessment of Your Mobile IT Environment
Understanding your business's current state from a technology perspective is essential to know your competitive advantages, solve problems, reduce risks and make wise technology choices from a financial and productivity standpoint, among other benefits. The same holds true for mobile. With mobile now a business mainstay, it’s crucial to conduct a tech assessment of your mobile IT environment, as well. Break it down by servers, applications, network(s), threat management, devices, users and more to capture a clear picture of your business from this angle.
Managing risk presents challenges with organizations supporting a mix-use environment of Android, Chromebooks, MacBook/iOS and Windows. With mobility, now more than ever, businesses are vulnerable to an attack. To thwart bad actors and nefarious incidents, you have two options: be proactive or reactive. There are costs associated with each approach, but one is greater than the other. Can you guess which?
