A business impact analysis (BIA) is a systematic process to determine and evaluate the potential effects of an interruption to critical business operations as a result of a disaster, accident or emergency. A Updates The BIA Ra and Plan in BCM is an essential component of an organization’s business continuity plan (BCP).
It includes an exploratory component to reveal any threats and vulnerabilities and a planning component to develop strategies for Cibil Score is Not Updated. The result is a business impact analysis report, which describes the potential risks specific to the organization studied.
Over the past few years, I have been asked this question and also noticed the many discussions among professionals on the topic of whether one should, when going through the BCM planning methodology, conduct Risk Assessment (RA) or Business Impact Analysis (BIA) first. Often, these discussions are long and go on with the hasty conclusion in sight.
Relationships between RA and other elements of a Updates The BIA Ra and Plan in BCM have undeniable relationships with each other as the results of RA and BIA are jointly used to develop suitable BC plans to cope with identified risks. In other words, the outputs of BIA (i.e. the key functions, risk appetite, minimum business continuity objective (MBCO), and maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPD)) together with the results of RA are jointly used to prepare the most suitable response plans.
Getting definitions out of the way
I’ll like to start by saying that Updates The BIA Ra and Plan in BCM are not the same things. They have gradually been used more and more interchangeably as similar processes, and this is not only incorrect but not identifying the individual features in each process can prove detrimental to your organization’s business continuity. The detailed definition can be found in BCMPedia.
Risk Assessment (RA) is the process of identifying internal and external threats and vulnerabilities, identifying the likelihood and impact of an event arising from such threats or vulnerabilities, defining the controls in place or necessary to reduce exposure and evaluating the cost for such controls.
Business Impact Analysis
Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is the process of analysing the effect of interruptions to business operations or processes on all business functions. The scope of Business Impact Analysis includes facilities, It Infrastructure, Hardware, and Data. The main objective of Business Impact Analysis is to identify the operational and financial impacts resulting from the major disruption of business functions and processes, and thus, BIA is incredibly crucial to Business Continuity Planning. The outputs from RA are a bit different from those of BIA.
RA gives you a list of risks together with their values, whereas Updates The BIA Ra and Plan in BCM gives you timing within which you need to recover (Recovery Time Objectives or RTO) and how much information you can afford to lose (Recovery Point Objectives or RPO). So, although these twos are related because they have to focus on the organization’s assets and processes, they are used in different contexts.
What does ISO22301 BCMS standard say?
Organisations may choose to conduct BIA to identify their critical business functions followed by RA to analyse and mitigate the potential risks faced by each business operations and processes. The advantage of this approach is that it focuses on the identification and mitigation of specific business threats faced by each business unit. Another approach would be to conduct RA to identify threats and establish the risk landscape at the corporate level before conducting BIA.
As the Updates The BIA Ra and Plan in BCM is set up to prepare and build resiliency against corporate-wide disruptions, it is reasonable to assess threats and estimate the possible period of disruption at the corporate level. The outcome could be used to establish the Key Planning Scenario, which sets the basis for planning in the subsequent stages.
An effective Business Continuity Management framework ensures the capability of an organisation to continue delivery of products and services at an acceptable predefined minimum level and safeguard the interests of key stakeholders. The understanding of potential threats faced by the organisation and the determination of recovery priorities set the foundation for BCM implementation. Our preferred approach would be first to conduct an RA at the corporate level to establish the Key Planning Scenario, which could be used as a benchmark for determining the organisation’s critical business function in the BIA. To mitigate the RA not completed correctly, in ISO22301, a continuous review using RA is repeated in the BIA and then the BC Strategy phase.