Structured workflows for Business Impact Analysis
Business impact analysis helps you to predict the consequences of a disruption on a business process or business function.
A business process is a set of tasks done by a business organization to deliver a business service or product to customers. When a business process is disrupted, the impact to the organization can be huge in terms of revenue and reputation. Business impact analysis (BIA) is performed to identify and prioritize critical processes, quantify or qualify the impacts, and identify recovery dependencies. Ideally, business impact analysis on critical processes must be performed annually.
The assessment of a business critical process disruption helps you to estimate the consequential impact on your business revenue, legal issues, workforce disruption, or business reputation. It also enables you to identify the dependencies of your business process on business applications, technology, or vendors that might be affected. This analysis gathers the information needed to develop recovery strategies.
Business impact analysis overview
Impact ratings for your business impact analysis
The Business Continuity Management (BCM) administrator of your organization defines the impact ratings for your business impact analysis (BIA) and decides if the impact is tolerable for your business process. For more information on the impact ratings, see Configure an impact rating to assess an impact category. According to the configuration set up by BCM administrator, the questions are displayed in the RTO Impact Assessment tab.
Consider the example where BCM administrator has configured an intolerable impact rating for the Revenue impact category. BCM administrator has defined what qualifies to be an intolerable impact. As a BIA owner, you must identify the timeline at which the revenue impact may go beyond $1M.
Multiple impact ratings for an impact category
If your BCM administrator has configured the assessment questionnaire to include multiple impact ratings for an impact category, the impact category ratings are displayed in the Impact Category view as shown in the example.
Administrator view for the impact category.
BCM administrators specify a threshold of non-tolerance for the impact ratings, per impact category. The disruption duration for the first non-tolerable impact category is selected for the recovery time objective (RTO). The impact ratings have the specified values:
- Low = 1
- Moderate = 2
- High = 3
See the example for the sample RTO calculation.
An example to show the calculation of impact category results.
| Scenario | Non-tolerable impact | Description | ||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scenario 1 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. | If the administrator has specified that Low regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO). In this example, the disruption duration for the 01 - Low impact rating is set to 4 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) for the impact category is above 4 hours. Even if the moderate impact disruption duration is shorter, the calculation will select the value from the first alphanumerically sorted impact rating that has the Tolerable field set to false. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Scenario 2 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. | If the administrator has specified that Moderate regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO). In this example, the disruption duration for 02 - Moderate impact is set to 24 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) for the impact category is above 24 hours. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Scenario 3 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. | If the administrator has specified that High regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO) as shown in the example. Image omitted: impact-category-admin-view.png Administrator view for the impact category.</p> In the tabular example, the disruption duration for 03 - High impact is set to 72 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective for the impact category is above 72 hours. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Scenario 4 | The Tolerable field for the Low, Moderate, and High impact ratings is set to true. | If the administrator has set all the impact ratings as tolerable, the value specified in the Maximum RTO value field in the template is selected as the recovery time objective (RTO). In the example, the administrator has set all the impact ratings as tolerable. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) is one month as per the value specified in the Maximum RTO value field. Image omitted: maximum-rto-value.png Maximum RTO value.</p></td></tr></tbody>
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