What You Need To Know Before You Start Your Business Impact Analysis?

The business impact analysis (BIA) is indispensable in developing a relevant and effective business continuity plan (BC).

Every business continuity programme, regardless of size, must regularly perform a BIA on the organization to ensure that the BC plan covers all critical parts of the business.

What is the Purpose of a BIA?

Before we write a business continuity plan, it is essential that we understand what functions we need to recover and by when. Organizations with numerous resource constraints must prioritize their recovery and focus on the business functions that most impact them if disrupted.

In particular, we want to identify those time-sensitive business functions that must be resumed quickly before too much damage is done. We want to focus on these business functions when developing a business continuity plan. We call them "critical business functions" or CBFs. A business impact analysis (BIA) is the process we use to identify these CBFs and associated recovery requirements.

Do I need to conduct BIA when implementing my Crisis Management (CM) or Crisis Communication (CC) Planning?

Readers who are implementing a Crisis Management (CM) or Crisis Communication (CC) plan and aligning it with the BCM planning methodology may wonder how BIA fits into the CM or CC discipline.

Suppose the CM and CC teams manage threats (disasters). In that case, both teams must review and understand the critical business functions, products, and services that were prioritized to be recovered. The CM and CC Teams are expected to retrieve the BIA report from the BCM Team; hence, there is no need to implement BIA when implementing their CM or CC Plans.

How About IT Disaster Recovery (ITDR) Planning?

When the BCM team identifies a critical business function during the implementation of the BIA, the individual business unit must determine the application or IT resources required to support its operation.

The IT Team responsible for implementing IT Disaster Recovery usually has two approaches. 

• IT Team have already developed their "IT BIA", which prioritises IT systems and applications.
• Access the BCM Team's BIA report and align the critical systems and applications prioritisation based on the criticality specified by the business units.  The ITDR Team will need to review the list as the business users do not know which component of the IT systems and applications they use.

What are the Products of a BIA?

A BIA is a handy tool in your BCM arsenal. A BIA will yield the following information:

• List of business functions in the organisation
• Impacts of a disruption
• Impacts of disruption over time
• the maximum time for business functions to recover before severe consequences occur
• operational dependency on other business functions and external agencies
• Information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems used
• maximum acceptable data loss- essential documents and records
  
  

Why Conduct A BIA?

Conducting a BIA is essential to your organization's business continuity programme.

A BIA has adequately been done and regularly reviewed, ensuring that critical parts of your organization are included in the business continuity planning process and accorded appropriate recovery priority in the event of a disaster.