What is Business Impact Analysis?
The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a very well-known step in the Business Continuity Management (BCM) lifecycle used to identify and evaluate the criticality of the organization’s business processes and supporting IT infrastructure. This criticality in turn drives such areas as recovery planning and strategies, incident prioritization, and plans and resources to develop better resiliency across the organization.
The Business Impact Analysis process can also provide valuable information for other risk and compliance processes. While the focus of the BIA is typically to determine availability requirements, business process owners and those inputting into the BIA can also identify compliance, risk, security or other requirements. These additional perspectives can be valuable input to prioritize issues, determine compliance or control requirements or assess business risk.
Why is assessing business impact important?
Investors, customers, regulators and boards of directors are becoming more interested in management’s capability to not only recovery quickly, but continue operations through any disruption. However, organizations that fail do so because they have not adequately assessed the criticality of their business processes and planned accordingly.
One major challenge to management is keeping track of the constantly changing landscape of business processes and their supporting infrastructure, such as their connection to IT systems, third parties, locations and critical information.
Another challenge is making sure current BIAs have been performed for all business processes so that management can understand their criticality to the business. The issues for most companies today is:
- BIAs are not completed often enough or consistently
- BIAs are completed in separate systems and spreadsheets
- BIAs are performed differently throughout the organization
- IT and the business complete separate BIAs
Now more than ever, business process managers and BCM teams must work together to perform BIAs to understand the strategic, financial, reputation and other key impacts of a disruption.
RSA Archer Business Impact Analysis
The RSA Archer BIA use case addresses the problems outlined above through key features that include:
- A Business Process catalog that tracks processes and their relationship to supporting infrastructure, such as IT systems, third parties, locations and critical information
- A pre-configured BIA that follows standards and best practices and includes workflow, notifications and reference data that BCM teams can use to determine the criticality of all business processes
- Dashboards and reports that enable each user to see and respond to the information they rely on
With RSA Archer BIA use case, you will be able to:
- Maintain one consolidated system of record for all BIAs
- Implement a single, best practice and standards-driven approach to completing BIAs with workflow, notifications, review and approval processes
- Quickly access reporting that shows key metrics and reports so BCM teams, Business Unit managers and business process managers can manage their BIAs
The RSA Archer Business Impact Analysis use case is a critical element of Integrated Risk Management. As your company drives business growth with new initiatives, technology adoption or market expansion, your BCM program must evolve and manage risk with more agility and integration than before. Managing the recovery and resiliency of what is most important within the organization is one required ingredient to effective integrated risk management. The BIA helps establish the business context and prioritization which are fundamental elements of managing risk.
RSA Archer can help your organization manage multiple dimensions of risk on one configurable, integrated software platform. With RSA Archer solutions, organizations can efficiently implement risk management processes using industry standards and best practices and significantly improve their business risk management maturity.
For more information, visit RSA.com or read the Datasheet.
