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Part of BCP is to calculate the risk and the cost of particular events. The IT Brief-Case portion is fairly easy to calculate. Consider a transactional server going offline. This server handles $10,000 in sales a day. The simple calculation is the $10,000 in sales that you should consider lost as you won't make $20,000 on the day that it comes back on line. The harder consideration are the indirect costs:
- Loss of credibility for the reliability of your business.
- The failure of processing may have led a customer to look for another source and thus, perhaps a permanent loss of repeat business.
- At some point the "empty" spot in order processing will trickle down leaving fulfillment idle.
This is a small example. Depending on the company, a potential loss of millions per day is possible. If data is actually lost, recreation may be impossible. The event, perhaps a natural disaster could disable a key (or the only) facility and inevitably bankrupt the business. The expense of BCP is often looked at as backup or insurance. Unfortunately, its value is never fully realized until disaster strikes. |