A method for assessing the time criticality of business processes. The BIA determines the impact of outages and defines recovery objectives (RTO/RPO).
Business impact analysis (BIA) examines the consequences of a business process disruption and how they increase over time. It helps identify critical processes, required resources and recovery priorities, providing a foundation for business continuity management (BCM).
BIA considers the consequences of disruption. Risk analysis examines possible causes and assesses risks. The perspectives complement each other: a process can have severe disruption impacts even when a particular cause is considered unlikely.
These objectives need to be considered alongside dependencies and available resources. BSI recommends documenting the reasoning behind decisions, process dependencies and resource requirements. BSI: documenting business impact analysis results (German).
In Kopexa, BIA is attached to the business process. You assess financial, regulatory, operational and reputational impacts across defined time windows. The assessment supports determining criticality and a proposed maximum tolerable disruption period. Recovery time, acceptable data loss and minimum service levels are added to the assessment.
The process connects this assessment with assets, information assets, suppliers, risks and tasks. Approved BIA versions preserve the process context and impact matrix used at the time, keeping the basis of decisions understandable later.