Business Impact Analysis

DarkSkope has successfully guided a range of businesses through the Business Impact Analysis process, at both Strategic and Business Unit levels.

What is a Business Impact Analysis?

A business impact analysis (BIA) is the process of determining the criticality of business activities and associated resource requirements to ensure operational resilience and continuity of operations during and after a business disruption. The BIA quantifies the impacts of disruptions on service delivery, risks to service delivery, and recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). These recovery requirements are then used to develop strategies, solutions and plans.

Advantages of Conducting a Business Impact Analysis
  • Improved Functionality
    • You can document and/or identify interdependencies between processes.
    • Actual applications and systems used, as well as their importance, are identified and updated. The functional importance of the applications become better understood by IT.
    • Shadow IT functions, often with critical business dependency, are identified. There is often an assumption that these SaaS/cloud-based applications do not have a backup or recovery need – that the vendor will “handle” that; this is not the case.
    • You gain a better understanding of the nature and complexity (or lack thereof) of the IT and recovery processes.
    • Identify or understand new processes or changes to existing processes.
    • Improvements in interface between departments and groups.
    • Increased understanding by departments of their role within the organization.
    • You achieve a better understanding of actual impact.
    • Gaps in IT recovery and business availably/recovery requirements are eliminated.
  • Reduced Costs
    • Elimination of potential fines related to regulatory requirements.
    • Removal of potential redundancies and unnecessary services or software.
    • Identification of potential changes to insurance, maintenance, or licensing costs.
    • Ability to reduce or remove costs based on new understanding of needs.
  • Increased Compliance
    • Identification of potential issues or gaps in regulatory compliance.
Business Impact Analysis Process

The DarkSkope BIA process is human led.  We do not use questionnaires, on-line survey tools or BIA templates.  Our success has been a result of our passionate, experienced people who work closely with individual clients to understand every possible detail about how their business functions.  We do not tell you how to conduct your business - you must own the process.  We facilitate and robustly challenge your thoughts, assumptions and decisions until everyone is strategically aligned and the Strategic Recovery Objectives (SROs) are agreed and understood by all levels of management throughout your organisation.

In Summary, the outline of the BIA process looks like this:

Phase 1: Initiation of BIA

Phase 2: Acquisition of Information

Phase 3: Analysis of Information

Phase 4:  Documentation of Findings

Phase 5:  Presentation of BIA to Management