What are business continuity metrics?

Metrics present performance information in objective terms. For that to happen, there needs to be awareness training about what is expected when the Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan is activated. Metrics help to focus on issues that management needs to be aware of. This metric is a way to quantify the extent to which your program complies with the business continuity standard you have chosen.

Establishing business continuity metrics, such as RTO and RPO, is critical to business continuity planning. Dedicating attention to RTO and RPO is the only way to ensure that your organization can continue to function in the event of a disaster. After all, when it comes to disaster recovery planning, do you want your business to run quickly, but to run on data from a week or even a day ago? The research revealed that 93% of organizations that have experienced significant data loss stop operating within five years. You should start with a risk analysis and business impact analysis to a) understand the biggest risks that threaten your organization and b) the impact of those risks on the various functions of the company.

Part of the process of creating an accepted disaster recovery and business continuity plan for the entire company is to create metrics and expectations that meet the company's strategic objective. Sucuri scans the entire Continuity Central website daily to ensure that there is no malware on the site. There is an expected level of service that the company relies on to assess the “uptime” required for specific business functions. One of the easiest ways to determine how business functions are interdependent is to use a dependency modeling tool.

If a recovery time of 0 to 4 hours is accepted, disaster recovery and business continuity should be initiated at least one to two hours before the maximum recovery (four hours). Finally, you should measure the number of plans that cover each business process, as well as the time elapsed since each plan was updated. The metrics most commonly used in business continuity management indicate very little importance about your program. Jon Seaton, president of the Scottish branch of the BCI, discusses the topic of business continuity metrics and analyzes why they are necessary and how to determine what metrics are required at different levels of the organization.

Initially, all companies would say that they can't afford to lose any data and that they can't tolerate any downtime.