A cornerstone of effective operational resilience is a clear understanding of your organisation's most critical services - the ones that must continue even in the face of disruption. The PREPARE framework will help you identify, prioritise, and protect these essential services using proven methodologies from our PREPARE framework.

Why Assess Criticality?

Not all services are created equal. Some are truly vital to your organisation's survival and success, while others, though important, may have more tolerance for downtime. By rigorously assessing criticality, you can:

• Focus resilience efforts and investments where they matter most.
• Set appropriate recovery time and point objectives.
• Identify and mitigate single points of failure.
• Improve stakeholder confidence and trust.
• Comply with regulatory expectations around impact tolerances.

Our Approach

The critical service assessment approach, grounded in the PREPARE framework, involves several key steps:

Business Impact Analysis (BIA) 

• Systematically evaluate the criticality of business processes, services, and products.
• Determine maximum tolerable downtime for each service.
• Assess operational, financial, legal, and reputational impacts of disruption.
• Identify internal and external dependencies.

Risk Assessment 

• Identify threats and vulnerabilities that could impact critical services.
• Assess likelihood and potential impact of disruption scenarios.
• Prioritise risks based on criticality of affected services.

Stakeholder Engagement 

• Collaborate with business process owners and subject matter experts.
• Validate BIA and risk assessment findings.
• Gain buy-in and support for resilience efforts.

Criticality Scoring and Prioritisation

• Assign criticality scores based on BIA and risk assessment data.
• Prioritize services based on criticality and risk exposure.
• Establish tiered recovery objectives and resilience requirements.

Resilience Requirements Definition 

• Translate service criticality into specific resilience requirements.
• Set recovery time and point objectives, minimum service levels, etc.
• Identify resilience gaps and improvement opportunities.

Continuous Refinement 

• Regularly reassess service criticality as business needs evolve.
• Update resilience plans and priorities based on changes.
• Monitor and report on resilience posture of critical services.

Benefits

Using the PREPARE framework to assess your critical services, you can:

• Gain a clear, data-driven view of operational priorities.
• Target resilience efforts for maximum risk reduction and business value.
• Establish defensible recovery objectives and minimise over- or under-investing.
• Improve alignment between resilience program and overall business strategy.
• Demonstrate rigorous resilience planning to regulators, customers, and stakeholders.