Operational disruption can happen for a range of reasons. Understanding the risks is the first step in building a continuity and recovery plan that is fit for purpose. That’s where a business impact analysis (BIA) comes in. It’s not always simple, but the benefits of doing so far outweigh the effort.
This 4-step guide walks you through how to conduct a business impact analysis and start protecting your organisation from the kind of disruptions that are becoming increasingly common.
Before learning how to conduct a business impact analysis, it’s important to understand what it is. A business impact analysis is an exercise to assess potential disruptions, their impacts on critical systems, and the strategies needed to maintain continuity. It forms the foundation for prioritising recovery efforts and strengthening operational resilience.
When considering how to conduct a business impact analysis, remember there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Your steps should be tailored to your organisation according to its needs, the industry it occupies, the regulations that it must comply with, and the threat landscape it faces.
This fundamental context is the foundation for every successful BIA, and it’s useful to use existing BIAs from other entities similar to your own to establish the basic framework for the rest of the process. The below steps explain how to conduct a business impact analysis.
Certain elements are crucial to operational resilience, and these can take many forms. Most commonly, this includes software assets and IT hardware infrastructure, both internal and external, although it can also cover other dependencies outside of the digital sphere. Work with teams across the business to map out what they rely on day-to-day. This makes it clear which systems and services are truly critical.
Once you have pinpointed the mission-critical systems and services, you need to quantify the outcomes of their disruption. This covers aspects like the costs of downtime and the damage to your organisation’s reputation resulting from service outages.
Different systems and services have different levels of downtime tolerance, according to their importance for operational continuity. Teams can cope without access to lesser-used tools than those that they rely on regularly, for example. As such, you need to determine downtime tolerance for each, and from this extrapolate aims for recovery efforts.
This is where you start shaping Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) for the critical systems you’ve identified. From here, you can logically prioritise the services that are the focus of recovery efforts.
The final step in how to conduct a business impact analysis is reporting. Your business impact analysis report should clearly present findings in a way that any stakeholder can understand and act on. Your report should guide business continuity planning and support regulatory compliance. Still, it must also be clear and concise enough that any team member or partner can appreciate its importance and act on its implications.
All sorts of organisations must now contend with BIA processes that focus on what happens when critical software tools are unexpectedly taken out of action.
Once you know how to conduct a business impact analysis, you’ll uncover critical dependencies, including third-party software. Escode’s software escrow services help mitigate these risks and protect access to essential systems in the event of vendor failure. Get in touch to talk to Escode about how software escrow can support and strengthen your business impact analysis and business continuity plans.
No you understand how to conduct a business impact analysis, take a look at our 'How To Conduct a Business Impact Analysis: 8 Key Stages' blog for guidance on team involvement, reporting, and ongoing testing.
Learn how Software Escrow helps mitigate risks identified in your Business Impact Analysis
