SanGrafix Video Game Company Business Process

The BMI was part of analyzing and selecting vital areas of SanGrafix Video Game Company. It was prepared on March 22, 2017. Regardless of how well the company plans for downtime errors, there is a chance that this will happen and the main point of consideration is how fast the company is able to recover from such errors.

1. Purpose

The purpose of this document is to identify and prioritize various system components in line with business processes that the system supports. It has the following parts:

1. Determining business processes and the areas that require critical recovery
2. Identifying resource requirements as per their urgency within the company
3. Identifying recovery priorities for system resources based on the urgency of required production (Gadir et al., 2015).

2. System Description

SanGrafix is a video game company of the 21st century that endeavors to create a scintillating experience with each video game they create. They are known to take the gaming experience to the next level as they aim to create a gaming experience that completely assimilates the real life experience. The company has a majority of its first-hand market in America. It offers a great variety of games from car racing to combat games all of which are the state of the art quality.

The company works under the principles of getting better and making the customer experience better and improved with each new product that is launched to the market. The company is highly reliant on top notch technology which drives the innovation behind each of their amazing products and hence its competitiveness is highly dependent on its ability to ensure they minimize errors or enhance their capability to recover from such errors within the shortest time (Master, 2014). The company is setting its footprints in an industry where the competition from other companies is fierce, and the chance of being kicked out and rendered irrelevant are beyond high. The company has a huge basement of employees all performing different specialized tasks aimed at ensuring continuous provision of services to its clients. There are the technical engineers who are in charge of developing and maintain the company’s system performing at optimal levels which include the network infrastructure, the hardware and software components. They are also in charge of creating the gaming programs that the company uses. The company as well has developers who come up with the games as well as constantly improving on them now and then according to developments in the market. The business has a vibrant marketing department which is always at the forefront of letting the consumers aware of any new products. The marketing team is as well in charge of creating and coming up with news ways through which the company can increase its reach to the market. The marketing team has been using the online platform as the main channel of marketing.

3. BIA Data Collection

The company as earlier mentioned uses the online platform as the main tool of marketing. The majority of the sales are recorded through the online shop while other sales are through and online catalogs. Calls can also be made to the head of the department where assistance is offered regarding sales or any other queries that the clients might have.

3.1 Determine Process and System Criticality

E-commerce processes are the heart and soul of SanGrafix Company since a huge percentage of the sales are recorded through the e-commerce platform. The majority of the clients do not even have the idea of where the company is located physically their interaction with the company is mostly limited to the e-commerce platform. As a result, the e-commerce processes are quintessential to the firm. The e-commerce processes of online payments include the transfer of funds from the buyer’s account to the bank’s accounts.

The majority of companies in the gaming industry is set on creating profits and so does SanGrafix and among the key supporters in the gaming profit generators is the E-mail based communications and the network that allows for multi-player support over a network for the company. Far away clients reach the company through emails where they place their orders waiting for delivery or response through the emails. The same emails are highly used within the company structure to pass information from one source to another every time it is deemed necessary to pass information around. The same email communication platform is highly utilized to get information about customers’ reaction towards certain products as the company has made it their traditions to seek the feelings of the customers towards services delivery and product performance. The customers are encouraged to use the email services more than the telephone mode to let the company know their reactions.

The company is practically in existence due to its online presence more than the physical presence. As a result, the Marketing and public relations sector are as well critically dependent on the online platform. The company conducts most of its marketing through its website as well as another host of social media pages it operates. The company has a lot of followers across the various social platforms who keep on increasing every so time. The followers are always keen and eager to learn of new products or any new information regarding their favorite product while at the same time there is a team of dedicated personnel who is always ready to feed the market with any form of information deemed necessary. Through this continuous exchange, the company can expand its market while at the same time maintain a high level of public relations with the clients.

Other departments that require the online presence within the company but at a lowered rate include the Research and development activities where research on how to improve on the current products is carried out. A team of developers who work on flexible working durations requires the online platform to expand the creativity into making the video games of the future. Customer service handling can be carried out through the online platform as well as through the telephone channels.

Mission/Business Process	Description
e-commerce processes	processes through which the company accepts payments for products
Marketing and public relations	Mechanism through which the company markets its products to the market
Research and development activities	Process of coming up with new products and improving existing ones
Customer service handling	Might require both online and telephone lines

3.1.1 Identify Outage Impacts and Estimated Downtime

Some of the potential outages that face the company include power outages which are normally rare and far in between. Nonetheless, the company is well equipped with a secondary source of energy that automatically reconnects as soon as a power outage is experienced which narrows the downtime experienced as the switch the second source of energy is almost immediate.

A server crash also negatively affects the operations of the company since most of their online activities would be brought to a halt. Nonetheless, the downtime experienced in this is short since it would only take a few moments to get hosting from other servers while a repair is being done to the company’s server. A website hack would also be catastrophic to the company since lots of business is done through the website. The downtime in this would be long since tracking hacking activities could be tedious and long to trace (Cordero et al., 2011).

Outage Impacts

1. Severe = a lot of money and time
2. Moderate = low fees and limited time
3. Minimal = limited cost and time

If of a power outage the company suffers minimal impact since business is barely affected by the power outage given the time lapse between switching the secondary power source is almost immediately. As a result power outage is a minimal impact outage to the company. Server crash carries the medium impact since getting another web to host the company is both costly and could take some moments hence negatively affecting the business. A hacking problem could have severe impact on the business since the amount of time and data lost in the process is a lot and could compromise the integrity and public confidence of the company besides violating the federation laws of protecting the client information and this could be followed by unending lawsuits that could push SanGrafix out of the gaming industry business (Wiggins, 2008).

Estimated Downtime

Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) by the company is the least time possible to get the business functioning again at the least cost

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) allocated to a power outage as well as server crash is minimal while the RTO for hacking could be extended.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for the company is daily hence it will lose a day’s data which is not so devastating for business.

Mission/Business Process	MTD	RTO	RPO
Power outage	Less than 1 hour	Less than 1 hour	Less than 1 hour
Server crash	6 hours	4 hours	12 hours
Hacking	72 hours	48 hours	12 hours

3.2 Identify Recovery Priorities for System Resources

The recovery time required for several outages is variant from each other.

Priority	System Resource/Component	Recovery Time Objective
Power outage	Electricity	Almost immediately to rebuild
Server crash	Optiplex GX280	Less than 12 hours to get another host
Hacking	Optiplex GX280	Less than 72 hours to reconstruct

References

Master, L. L. (2014). Assessing threats and setting priorities for conservation. Conservation of networks, 5(4), 559-563

Cordero, A., Gonzalez, N., Chen, Z., Campos, R., Polanco, A., Melfi, D., … & Ouchaou, M. (2011). U.S. Patent Application No. 09/789,834.

Gadir, O. M., Subbanna, K., Vayyala, A. R., Shanmugam, H., Bodas, A. P., Tripathy, T. K., … & Rao, K. H. (2015). U.S. Patent No. 6,944,785. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Wiggins, C. (2008). U.S. Patent No. 5,717,604. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.