Critical Incident Management

Contemporary with risk assessments, asset prioritization comes into play. Considering fault tolerance, it is the organization's ability to continue profitable operations when confronted with emergencies. Fault tolerance basically defines the minimum level at which organizations can profitably exist. Asset criticality can usually be determined by asking questions such as:

• How would you handle an operation interruption of the following durations? 1 hour? 8 hours? 24 hours? 48 hours? 72 hours?

• Which assets are you required to have in these time periods to maintain profitable operations?

Ranking assets according to their criticality is generally expressed in the context of continuing profitable business operations. Here is a proposed structure to rank assets according to their criticality:

• High. These assets are absolutely essential for business operations. There is no redundancy for these assets and fault tolerance is low. Business operational tolerance to interruption is extremely low with the cost of interruption being very high. For the organization to continue profitable operations, it would need to arrange to have these specific assets or duplicate assets immediately available. The availability time for these assets would be measured in minutes, not hours.

• Medium. These assets are somewhat replaceable by duplicate means or can be performed manually for a very limited time. Absence of these assets is tolerable for a short time. There is a somewhat higher tolerance for interruption.

• Low. These assets may be substituted with some difficulty, but are somewhat tolerant to interruption for a longer period of time than the more-critical assets. However, these assets require reinstatement when the organization is restored after a critical incident.

• Routine. These assets may be interrupted for an extended period of time with little or no cost to profitable operations. Assets of this nature are very fault tolerant. After the organization is restored to complete operation, these assets become a consideration.