Business Impact Analysis - BIA

A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a good framework within which to understand and calculate downtime cost. The central task is to identify your critical business functions based upon data or application integrity and the sensitivity of each to downtime.
 
You will want to determine the maximum downtime that each specific, critical business function can sustain before the business is impacted. Considering the impacts of both long and short term outages will help you determine what the recovery objective should be for each business function.
 
A BIA is an information gathering exercise designed to methodically identify:
 

• The Processes or Functions performed by an organization
• The outsource required the support each process performed
• Interdependencies between processes and/or departments
• The impact of failing to perform a process
• The criticality of each process
• A recovery time objective (RTO) for each process
• A recovery point objection (RPO) for the data that supports each process

 
The goal of the BIA is to give businesses the information they need to move toward a resilient infrastructure. Included within the BIA should be specific recommendation about security, information retention, data and service consolidation, service-level agreements, and the data and application resilience of the current infrastructure.