Impact Analysis plays an important part in IT DR Planning.  It generates essential deadlines, ensuring assets are recovered within tolerable limits in an incident, prioritising and setting the required tempo for safe recovery.  It informs business-as-usual decisions to invest in the resilience of the IT estate, identifying risks and improvement opportunities.  

Inoni maps offer two important features not provided by conventional analytic techniques and approaches. 

First, it provides unique structured graphical representation of organisational assets and their critical interdependencies.  Each mapped asset has editable settings that are used to fine-tune resilience parameters so the map accurately reflects reality.  Each mapped asset can be assigned its own recovery plan allowing these parameters to be satisfied.  The optimisation and transparency implicit in this approach reduces error, accurately aligning plans with the organisation. 

Second, it uses quantified values.  This is important because for any recoverable asset, there are two resilience outcomes we should strenuously avoid:  

1. Under-provision (of appropriate resilience), resulting in intolerable exposure to risk; and  
2. Excessive over-provision, generating unnecessary and accumulating expense.  

Conventional approaches often rely on questionable logic, and individuals’ interpretation of the situation and organisational risk appetite.  Mapping quantifies all relevant values, allowing us to see the impact of losing an asset or the risk of failing to recover in real money terms, guiding our subsequent decisions. 

Advantages of mapping

Mapping offers significant advantages over these conventional approaches, including 

• Simplifying collection of structured data for use in plan documents 
• Real-time continual improvement, re-calculating as information becomes available 
• Visualising value chains, revealing risk concentrations and hotspots 
• Developing a common shared view and basis for improvement (communication) 
• Repeatable transparent calculation so you can see where and why values originate 
• Approximating and prioritising treatment of asset risk including Return on Investment 
• Assessing the effects of environment changes and new resilience measures  

Inoni maps offer numerous tangible and intangible benefits to customers, improving certainty and building confidence in organisational resilience, whilst potentially saving time and money.