What Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Metrics Matter The Most?

There’s no doubt that data is king. If you don’t have business continuity and disaster recovery metrics to measure the processes, you can’t manage those processes. Reporting on metrics allows you to estimate the efficacy of your strategy and efforts, but there are certain challenges involved. First off, what are those metrics?

It’s critical to understand which metrics present the most value in business continuity and disaster recovery, which is what this article will focus on.

The Importance of Business Continuity Metrics

Business continuity metrics perform vital functions:

Metrics serve as a monitor and control tool.

What’s the best way to know your business functions are in order? Metrics present an objective insight into your organization’s processes.

Metrics allow for an accurate evaluation.

To substantiate the fact that your efforts are either fruitful or futile, metrics will help you quantify your observations with solid evidence.

Metrics are the basis for improvement.

Metrics will help you outline the path of your progress and set forth the improvement tactics.

What Are The Most Important BCDR Metrics?

Each BCDR metric corresponds to a specific business continuity practice area.

Operational metrics help understand risk assessment and conduct business impact analysis. Such metrics focus on the threats to the organization, their probability, and how these threats can affect the business. Operational metrics assist in estimating and determining:

• Operational vulnerabilities during the steps of the process.
• Downtime impact measured by RTO and BIA.
• Critical business processes and their value to the business.
• Critical auxiliary resources, including the type of data and specific roles within a company.
• Critical vendors.

Business continuity program metrics help track the overall progress of a task or an entire project. Such metrics also provide insights into the efficiency of completing tasks, along with compliance with regulations and conformance to standards.

Resilience metrics let us evaluate how effective are our hazard mitigation measures and how quickly an organization can respond to a disruption. In this case, testing exercises help get a broad estimation.

Business Continuity Metrics Tool

When it comes to finding a particular tool for collecting, analyzing, and presenting your data, there may not be a singular solution. For example, don’t neglect using a good old Excel spreadsheet, backed by a tool containing built-in templates.

When reporting and presenting your findings, start with the most important metrics and high-impact findings from your research. Visuals tend to make your data analysis more comprehensible, for instance, data visualization charts. However, don’t overload your presentation with imagery.

The following type of information can assist you in completing your analysis:

• Company mission and objectives.
• Main organizational processes.
• Data from a business interruption analysis that can help with prioritizing  your metrics.

As a good practice, keep your data clean. To achieve that, analyze your data for potential duplication and standardize the data input with drop-down menus, pick lists, text formatting, and data validation. Additionally, integrate your BCDR software with other platforms or tools for a more streamlined process.

A metrics-driven approach to business continuity can either make or break your entire business continuity management initiative. Some businesses may not have the processes or keep documentation necessary to develop and report in detail for the metrics mentioned above. However, once established, such metrics will produce an ongoing method for communicating performance, progress, and escalating issues that answer executive questions about business continuity program performance and the livelihood of a business.