Risk Profile

Covisia Risk Profiles serve as the basis for building business continuity plans for our clients. Rather than creating profiles based on technology components, we recommend that executives evaluate the risk they can afford for each business function. This approach ensures appropriate continuity plans are in place. It is just as important to control overall cost of disaster recovery by ensuring non-mission-critical systems are not over protected.

For example, rather than considering how long can the business can afford for the entire computer network to be down, Covisia recommends considering how long each specific business function can be down, such as accounts payable, human resources, the general ledger, e-mail, printing, and the sales department’s CRM application. We begin the process by helping executives build continuity plans for each business function based on two concepts:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How quickly does each business function need to be restored after a disaster strikes?

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Which point-in-time does the business need each function to revert back to after recovery? In some cases it might be the moment the system went down, but in other cases it could be an earlier point-in-time.
   

Covisia helps businesses create RTOs and RPOs for every business function, each of which should have its own recovery plan. This allows executives to bullet-proof critical business functions without investing money and time into restoring functions that can afford to be down for longer time periods.

By applying this approach to disaster recovery planning, executives develop a risk profile that matches the importance of each business function so that when disasters strike, the proper technology restore processes can be applied.