When it comes to business continuity planning, it’s clear that the business impact analysis (BIA) is an essential component of your plan. But what exactly is a business impact analysis?
Simply put, a business impact analysis is a thorough, methodical process for analyzing the impact of interruptions on the daily operations of your business.
A business impact analysis will:
- Identify all of your business functions
- Understand how critical each process is to the healthy operation of your organization
- Show the dependencies critical processes have on other processes and resources
- Explore the type and severity of impact a disruption to your processes
- Gauge the amount of time your organization can go without a given process
- Outline the resources required to recover processes to a minimum level within the maximum allowable downtime
- Prioritize the allocation of recovery activities and resources in advance of a potential disruption
- Create a recovery strategy
Once you’ve completed your business impact analysis you will have a solid foundation for the rest of your business continuity plan.
