Business Impact Analysis (BIA) evaluates how a specific threat, incident, or change affects the organization. Impacts can be negative (e.g., disruptions, risks) or positive (e.g., benefits from improvements). A BIA helps an organization anticipate consequences, plan recovery from disruptions, and identify the resources needed to implement changes or improvements.
- A BIA helps an organization anticipate the consequences of any change or disruption
- A BIA assesses the potential benefits of introducing a measure or improvement
- BIA evaluates the potential negative effects of a specific threat, hazard, risk, or other adverse event on the organization
- Determining the resources required to implement the change or improvement
- Identifying impacts on processes, people, technology, and other resources
- Estimating potential outcomes and consequences
Where and How SMBs Use BIA
Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a practical method used across many business areas. Below are common ways SMBs apply BIA:
Risk Management
- Assessing Risk and Threat Impacts: BIA pinpoints critical business functions and evaluates how disruptions could affect them, supporting effective risk mitigation.
- BIA identifies essential processes and measures the potential impact of outages, guiding risk reduction plans.
- Forecasts the consequences of a disruption to your business and what’s required to recover.
- Outlines potential loss scenarios during risk assessments
Change Management
- Evaluating Changes: BIA reviews the impact of new tools or processes on people, workflows, technology, and other resources (e.g., rolling out a new app).
- Reducing Negative Impacts: It shows how organizational changes could affect critical operations and helps plan to minimize disruption.
- Determining the resources required to implement the change
Project Management
- BIA supports project planning by highlighting risks and impacts on timelines and deliverables, ensuring contingency plans are ready.
- Identifying potential project risks:
Business Continuity Planning
- Identifying Critical Activities: BIA pinpoints the most important activities and sets recovery priorities.
- Recovery Planning: It defines the minimum resources needed to restore critical operations within target recovery times.
- Decision Support: BIA provides the insights needed to select measures that reduce risk and maintain continuity.
- Applying BIA in these areas helps SMBs prepare for and respond to disruptions, improving day-to-day operations and resilience.
How to perform a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) in company?
- Uses standard methods to identify impacts on operations, staff, technology, and other key resources
- Identifies critical business activities
- Sets recovery priorities based on assessed business impacts
- Conducted through analysis of business processes and supporting resources
- Evaluates time-based impacts, such as Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
How Aptien Helps with BIA
- Record of individual assets and processes
- Creation of dependencies and relationships between individual assets