Structured workflows for Business Impact Analysis
Summarize
Summary of Structured Workflows for Business Impact Analysis
Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is crucial for predicting the effects of disruptions on business processes, which are essential for delivering services or products. Conducting a BIA helps organizations identify and prioritize critical processes, assess impacts, and determine recovery dependencies. Regular assessments, ideally performed annually, aid in estimating potential revenue losses and other consequences of disruptions, as well as identifying dependencies on applications, technology, or vendors.
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Key Features
- Impact Ratings: The BCM administrator defines impact ratings, determining what is considered tolerable or intolerable for various business functions.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): RTO is established based on the longest tolerable disruption duration across different impact categories, which helps prioritize recovery efforts.
- Category Score Calculation: Each impact category's score is derived from the maximum value of impact analysis questions, which contributes to the Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
- Automatic RTO Updates: Adjustments in disruption durations trigger automatic recalculations of the BIA's RTO based on the lowest tolerable downtime across all impact categories.
Key Outcomes
By using BIA effectively, organizations can develop informed recovery strategies during planning, prioritize assets based on critical dependencies, and ensure preparedness for potential disruptions. This structured approach not only safeguards revenue and reputation but also enhances overall business resilience.
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 in 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.
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 ../task/configure-impact-rating-bcp.html. According to the configuration set up by the BCM administrator, the questions are displayed in the RTO Impact Assessment tab.
Consider the following example where the BCM administrator has configured an intolerable impact rating for the Revenue impact category. The 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 following example.
- Low = 1
- Moderate = 2
- High = 3
| 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 following example. 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 following 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. |
- Calculation of category score from impact analysis questions for an impact category that contributes to Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
If the impact category contributes to RPO, then evaluate each impact analysis question in that RPO category based on the value of your data like business critical, operation critical, business essential, or operation essential. The maximum value among all the questions of that RPO is considered as the Category Score of that Impact Category and stored in the Impact Category Results table [sn_bia_category_result].
- Calculation of overall impact assessment result for a BIA
When you update the Disruption Duration of an impact category, the RTO of the BIA is automatically updated. The RTO of the BIA is set as the lowest tolerable downtime from each impact category.
For example, consider a BIA having four impact categories – Legal, Reputation, Workforce, and Regulatory. When you update the disruption duration value of the legal impact category, then the RTO value of the BIA is recalculated based on the lowest tolerable disruption duration from each impact category. The Recovery Tier varies from organization to organization and is set based on the recalculated RTO value.
RTO value Recovery Tier Immediate Mission Critical 1 Hour Mission Critical 4 Hours Mission Critical 8 Hours Business Critical 24 Hours Business Critical 72 Hours Essential 1 Week Essential 2 Weeks Non-Essential 1 Month Non-Essential