A Deterministic Time-Dependent Resilience-Based Measure for Disaster Recovery in Business Continuity Applications

Abstract

Resilience is generally defined as the ability of a system or entity to recover from a disruptive event. From an engineering perspective, the resilience of a system needs to be quantified to measure and assess its recoverability. Current resilience-based metrics focus on complex engineering and networked systems. However, businesses are adapting the concept of resilience, translated into the known term business continuity. Yet, the common metrics for business continuity and disaster recovery are static in nature and mathematically expressed as single-point values, which can be insufficient for comprehensive decision-making. This article introduces the Business Continuity Recovery Measure (BCRM), a time-dependent resilience metric designed to quantify disaster recovery for business continuity applications. By developing a service-centric measure, businesses can quantify their continuity plans with a suitable measure. The proposed metric takes into account business dynamics, such as allowing organizations to assign weights of importance to their services, accounting for interdependencies across services and business units, and allowing partial operation of services. As illustrated in the article, the proposed BCRM facilitates the comparison of disaster recovery plans for a business by evaluating alternative recovery strategies and focuses not only on restoration time but also progress over time. Utilizing the BCRM, the provided illustrative example showed that a heuristic-based approach can improve the recovery trajectory of weighted operational services by over 100% at specific time intervals compared to a random approach.