Business Impact Analysis

Benefit: The overall goal of the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is to determine the critical business processes, their financial impacts, and the critical timeframes required for recovery to protect your company in the event of a disastrous occurrence. Consideration toward legal mandates and complex regulatory issues, such as HIPPA and Sarbanes Oxley are addressed in this analysis.  Your company, being a high profile company, produces a product with high visibility and that product is the foundation for your company’s survival.  It is important to note that a critical business process path exists and it is the primary backbone of your company’s ability to continue your critical operations. This path, its vulnerabilities and financial importance to the well-being of your operations, is the primary concern for capturing the extremely high reliance that all business functions have on information technology and other services.

Description: A full and comprehensive BIA can map the many and varying disaster affects. This BIA equips a company with information to reduce the seriousness and length of an outage event that is associated with those affects.  A BIA does much more than suggest recovery solutions; it is used by management to:

  • Prevent problems by developing an awareness program,
  • Alert to specific vulnerabilities and their consequences,
  • Provides data for setting priorities, establishing strategies, and developing solutions for comprehensively managing continuity and recovery,
  • Assist with strategic planning decisions that are based upon projected needs and costs, so that the decisions can satisfy the recovery time objectives and consequently are as cost-effective as possible,
  • Completing the BIA guarantees that the responsibility for protecting the assets of your company are recognized,
  • Identifies all critical business processes and their dependencies on IT services and creates a gap report for the business needs as opposed to the IT abilities,
  • Understand critical business processes and link them to existing financial information for determining the financial impact to your company,
  • The business processes, defined as critical will have their recovery time objectives identified.  This will assure business continuation and will utilize these processes as the baseline for strategy development both for IT and work area recovery,
  • Identifies all single points of failure and recommends the mitigation processes to solve the risks and financial burdens.