Business Impact Analysis

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What Does Business Impact Analysis Mean?

Business impact analysis (BIA) is a component of business continuity planning that helps to identify critical and non-critical systems. A business impact analysis also assigns consequences and usually a dollar figure to specific disaster scenarios. It will also include estimated recovery times and recovery requirements for such scenarios. The business impact analysis is often used to measure the risks of failure against the costs of upgrading a particular system.

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Techopedia Explains Business Impact Analysis

A business impact analysis can work on several levels. An organization-wide BIA will identify large risks and their fallout, such as losing all the data on the company servers. A branch or department BIA will highlight the particular systems that are critical to those users and what would happen if they were unable to access them. The overall business continuity plan will contain steps for addressing any problems, but a BIA can be very helpful in spotting obvious weaknesses before they become serious issues.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.