Perform a Business Impact Analysis for E-Commerce Businesses
Identify Critical Business Functions
Identify Critical Business Functions
As the first part of the methodology, it is important that all critical business functions are identified. For an e-commerce business, these functions are tied into cyberspace. Functions that were traditionally labeled within "storefront" organizations as critical include accounting, sales, inventory control, shipping and receiving, accounts receivable, accounts payable, general ledger, marketing, and customer service. The most critical of all functions, and the one that differentiates the traditional business from non-traditional, is ensuring Internet connectivity. Another non-traditional critical function is securing online transactions. For e-businesses like eBay, Telebank, E*TRADE, Amazon.com, and others, when a disruption in service occurs, it is the same as when the storefront of a more traditional organization closes, except the impact is much greater. Unlike the more localized impact caused by the inability of customers to access a physical store due to a regional disaster, the impact from the loss of Internet access for a company like eBay, is similar to having every storefront of a traditional company close down.
It is not just the e-commerce organization that has been impacted by conducting business through the Internet. A good example of the change in the criticality of functions in more traditional business is occurring in the healthcare field. New technologies have brought about electronic diagnostic imaging (electronic radiology). Images are now solely located as records on healthcare computer systems and are stored there along with other patient identifiable information. These records are frequently transmitted between healthcare organizations. Medical records that get into the hands of the wrong person have resulted in lawsuits. Not to mention the bad publicity associated with medical record privacy leaks. Cases of private medical information, such as a patient's HIV status being published in newspapers, have become more widespread. Because of the sensitivity of these issues, new regulations regarding the protection of medical records have been put in place on both the national and state levels.
Threat and Vulnerability Analysis
E-commerce businesses are particularly vulnerable to certain threats because of their complete dependency on the integrity of their computer systems. Particular areas to concentrate on include software and hardware failure, utilities and services failures, hacker attacks, malicious software, and severe weather. Although information integrity has been a mainstay of information security for many years, it has become a system requirement for companies relying on the Internet for revenue. An example of the increasing importance of system integrity is eBay. The company has stated that software problems created the outage in June. For eBay, other outages have been the result of hardware failures, software upgrades, a lost connection over a T-1 line due to nearby construction, database corruption, and a well publicized hacker attack that brought down their homepage.
Extent of Potential Losses
This area may present a challenge with non-traditional e-businesses. Although short-term revenue loss is much easier to track, long-term loss resulting from the loss of customer confidence is much harder to define. Of course, loss of revenues does not include the potential loss of investor confidence. As we saw earlier in eBay's case, the potential damage far exceeded the expectations. Late last year, eBay had their systems go down several times while Wall Street continued to invest in the company. The tune changed this year; however, when an extended system outage cause a devaluation of their stock price. This case shows that potential losses are sometimes difficult to predict. With the value of an entire company resting on the integrity of the computer system, it pays to overestimate and plan accordingly.
Identify and Prioritize Recovery Requirements
What will it take to keep the e-commerce business functions operating? The first task is to identify and prioritize the services that must be promptly recovered. In E*TRADE's case, the online trading services would be a priority, along with accounting and security functions. Without trading functions, customers could loose significant amounts of money in transactions. For companies like Amazon.com the loss of customers to other online services is also significant. Some of their major competitors, Borders Online, Inc. (Borders.com) or Barnes&Noble (bn.com), are neither traditional nor solely e-commerce businesses. These companies maintain both a physical storefront and cyberspace storefront, creating a more complex set of recovery strategies.
Identify and Reinforce Disaster Avoidance Measures
In the case of an e-commerce business, what steps can be taken to keep Internet connectivity functioning at all times, with little or no disruption of service?
The objective here is to take steps to reduce the possibility of having respond to a disaster. These include utilizing redundant systems, alternative routing, rigid change controls (testing, user acceptance, change backouts), encryption, capacity planning, load balancing, load or stress testing, access control, and anti-virus (malicious software defenses against rogue programs like Java, ActiveX, and Trojan Horses) protection.
Once the requirements are identified, it is time to choose a strategy. In the case of eBay, and for many other e-businesses, more intense testing of the integrity of new software modifications should be undertaken. A way to test system integrity is a "dual production" environment. Some other steps include the implementation of redundant systems. This type of environment, although costly to implement, is worth the investment. By having two production systems, and one test system, any upgrades or software implementations can be conducted on a test system which ties into a production system that is running. Problems with tests that cause the system to crash would not affect the main system. Other benefits of this process include providing an updated backup should the main system crash due to hardware glitches, database corruptions, etc.
Through the identification of critical impact areas, eBay might have had plans in effect that would ensure the backup of T-1 lines, have alternative strategies in effect for external environmental impacts (such as local construction companies accidentally cutting power lines), database corruption, and other potentially damaging events. Some alternative strategies could include providing backup/replacement hardware, software, network and computing equipment, alternative routing, and providing for alternative data communications services. Areas that traditionally fall into the information security area world would also need to be identified, such as establishing tighter access controls, use of the latest anti-virus software, and encryption.
Finally, load balancing, conducting stress tests and implementing capacity planning will ensure that systems don't continually spike, and ultimately crash. This was one of the problems at eBay, when they experienced spikes in their common gateway interface (CGI) application servers, leading to a May 7 outage.
The implementation of an e-commerce business resumption plan includes looking at the possible areas of service failures such as power outages caused by computer glitches or natural disasters, software glitches, telecommunications failures, providing solutions such as data and software backups to offsite computing systems, assigning responsibilities for tracking each critical systems application to employees, and updating contractual agreements with backup and alternative site vendors.
Ronald E. Freedman is Vice President of The Netplex Group, Inc., a McLean, VA based professional services company. Mr. Freedman is responsible for the Business Protection Services division of Netplex, the contingency planning and information security consulting arm of the company
