Business Impact Analysis and its importance in the Company.

A crucial component when developing a business continuity management system is –without a doubt– Business Impact Analysis (BIA). It defines the key aspects of business continuity in order to determine strategies and actions for dealing with disruptive incidents. This involves analyzing and evaluating the company’s main activities and determining the effect that an interruption may have on them.

Developing a BIA is a fundamental exercise for establishing effective frameworks for company resilience based on a business continuity plan capable of ensuring organizational resilience.

The activities or process to create a BIA can also be useful to focus and improve other business strategy’s aspects, such as communication, knowledge transfer, and processes and activities understanding-oriented learning in projects or services. Determining which aspects of the company’s operation are critical or not and, from this identifying actions and measures to mitigate risks in the interruption of services and operation in general.

The associated actions comprise priority setting for service recovery, service recovery level, and resources needed to facilitate recovery and thus reduce points of failure.

For this purpose, the following associated concepts are defined:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO). It refers to the time available to recover products and/or services associated with critical processes to the business.
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO). It is the minimum limit for business continuity, that is to say, the minimum tolerance time for the loss of information, since it can be recovered.
• Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPD). It is the maximum limit of unavailability established to indicate the time where the activity or restoration of products and/or services is considered to continue.
• Minimum Business Continuity Objective (MBCO). It is the minimum level of services and/or products that is acceptable to the organization to achieve its objectives during an incident.