Four Ways to Enhance Your BIAs
Learn about the four ways in which you can enhance your BIAs (business impact analyses) and make the process of performing them easier.
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What is a business impact analysis (BIA)?
A business impact analysis is a fundamental component of business continuity and operational resilience efforts. As the name implies, it’s a process in which you analyze how much (disruptive) impact your business can tolerate.
Here are the basic steps:
- Identify your business’s most critical functions.
- Forecast what would happen if these functions were to be disrupted, looking at financial, operational, compliance, and reputational consequences.
- Determine how long you could withstand such a disruption before sustaining serious harm. (This length of time is your RTO—recovery time objective.)
- Document your findings to help with your business continuity efforts.
Why is a business impact analysis necessary?
A BIA brings clarity, efficiency, and effectiveness to your business continuity efforts by giving you:
- Specific goals for your planning and strategizing.
- Crucial information to share with leadership, regulators, and everyone involved with business continuity.
- A basis for making decisions, committing resources, and testing strategies.
Think of BIA as the accurate map you need in order to move toward your goals of business continuity and operational resilience.
What problems does a business impact analysis solve?
A business impact analysis gives you clarity and efficiency in your business continuity endeavors. Without it, your attempts to plan for disruption will suffer from:
- Lack of focus. Planning for every possibility—or planning for the wrong scenarios—leaves your organization vulnerable.
- Waste of resources. Without a BIA, you can spend time and effort planning for the wrong eventualities or recovering the wrong functions.
- Unexpected consequences. Your RTO (recovery time objective) should drive your business continuity efforts. Without knowing how long you can withstand disruption, you can easily discover that metric the hard way.
- Inability to strategize effectively. A BIA prioritizes your business continuity efforts. Without it, you can’t know that you’re formulating the solutions you need.
How do you implement a business impact analysis?
To carry out a BIA, select knowledgeable people from all important areas of your company and have them help you determine:
- The business processes your company can’t survive without.
- Everything these critical functions rely upon, in terms of people, data, systems, third parties, facilities, etc.
- The impact your company would suffer from losing your most crucial processes. Exactly how long could you go without each of them?
The final step of a BIA is to document your conclusions—and keep your documentation up to date.
BIAs require the time and attention of many important people throughout your company. To streamline BIA efforts and ensure that analyses remain accurate, many organizations use specialized software.
How does Fusion help with business impact analyses?
Fusion is purpose-built to facilitate and strengthen business continuity and resilience efforts—including BIAs.
The platform helps BIA efforts in several ways:
- Guiding the collection of information with questionnaires.
- Simplifying the process of gathering input from every corner of your organization.
- Transforming collected data into valuable insights instantly with easy-to-read dashboards.
- Producing reports to meet the needs of leadership, regulators, and business continuity teams.
- Making it much easier to keep your BIA up to date and reliable.
Use continuity management software to bring your BIAs up to speed
It’s never been easier to make your BIAs what they need to be: accurate, informative, strategic, and dynamic. Fusion can get you there.