If you’re wondering how to write a business impact analysis, it starts with understanding what a BIA is. At its core, a business impact analysis (BIA) identifies and evaluates potential disruptions to your organisation’s mission-critical operations. It helps quantify risks, prioritise essential processes, and plan recovery strategies, ultimately improving operational resilience and business continuity.
Example Scenario: Your BIA might reveal that a critical application from a third-party vendor is essential for smooth operations, and the cost of downtime is likely to be steep. In this case, the next steps, such as investing in a software escrow service, become apparent once the impact analysis is complete.
Conducting a business impact analysis not only identifies risks but also helps your business adapt to uncertainties such as supply chain issues, third-party vendors, and increasingly stringent regulations. Key advantages include:
Learning how to write a business impact analysis means following a structured approach. While each business impact analysis will be unique to your organisation, these 8 stages apply universally:
Before you can analyse the impact of a given incident, you need to know the core activities that are most vulnerable to disruption. Depending on your industry niche, this list can include IT operations, supply chain management, customer-facing services, and production processes.
Ideally, you will have a clear overview of mission-critical business functions that are either instrumental to revenue generation, regulatory compliance, or both. This lays the groundwork for BIA itself.
Next, review critical processes to determine the resources they depend on for continuity. This includes employees responsible for their oversight and implementation, software and hardware involved in perpetuating them, third-party vendors associated with their provision, or the underlying infrastructure that makes them accessible.
For example, you might find that operational resilience is contingent on access to a SaaS platform from an outside supplier. This tells you where you need to focus your continuity and recovery planning efforts.
The risks that apply to critical functions and processes can vary, so identify and assess each one carefully. From here, you can plot the likely operational ramifications of such issues.
Let’s say you work out that hardware failure at a third-party provider would limit access to crucial customer data, thus stymieing internal workflows. This loops you in on an important vulnerability, in turn pointing to mitigation steps that are necessary as a result.
Every risk you highlight has an associated ripple effect, so a BIA must include precise and realistic calculations of the scope of impact, especially from a financial standpoint. Quantifying the hourly cost of IT downtime is a good example of this, as it clarifies the extent of your exposure in the event of a disruptive incident, rather than the impact of a given threat being vague.
Disruption costs rise quickly, so your BIA must define how fast recovery needs to happen to minimize damage. This comes down to ranking RTOs according to the priority of the process in question. A piece of mission-critical software involved in payment processing may need to be back online in minutes, rather than hours, if serious consequences are to be sidestepped. Meanwhile, circumstances preventing employees from gaining site access might be deemed non-essential if team members can work remotely, thus falling further down the list of priorities.
Writing a BIA is rarely a solo task. If you want to know how to write a business impact analysis effectively, collaboration is essential. Bring in teams from across the business who are involved in critical processes and risks to get a complete picture. This also avoids the likelihood of dependencies being overlooked or threats going ignored because they are unique to a given niche and therefore not on the radar of decision-makers. This is doubly necessary in the case of IT resources, where vulnerabilities are often so complex and multifaceted as to be impervious and inscrutable to anyone other than experts.
Aside from providing a more holistic and comprehensive BIA, this approach means that departments are aligned on which processes to prioritise post-incident when continuity and recovery plans are being implemented.
Even with a broad scope, make sure your BIA findings are clear and concise, so they're easy to act on. If you can succinctly summarise the risks identified, the impacts they are likely to have, the critical functions that are a top priority for continuity purposes, and the plans you have for recovery, acting upon this will be much more achievable. This applies not only to the data you collect and quantify, but also to the language you use to convey it.
Once you’ve learned how to write a business impact analysis and completed your first draft, the next step is testing. Run controlled simulations of events, such as IT outages or vendor failure, to validate your findings and strengthen continuity plans. Verifying plans will help you spot gaps and fine-tune your approach. You should be updating your BIA regularly, especially if your company makes changes or new technologies are introduced.
Strengthen your operational resilience and protect critical systems by using software escrow to secure access to essential applications when third-party vendors fail.
If your business impact analysis uncovers critical dependencies, Escode can help ensure business continuity and minimise disruptions. Learn more about our software escrow solutions today.
Now you understand how to write a business impact analysis, read our 'Business Impact Analysis Report: What It Is, Why It Matters, and Metrics To Include' blog for guidance on the key metrics to include in your BIA report, read our blog
