BIA | Business Impact Analysis
A-to-Zerto Glossary of Terms
What Is Business Impact Analysis?
BIA looks at the critical, time-sensitive operations of your organization to determine what will happen in the event of any interruption, disruption, or disaster, including natural disasters. With an emphasis on business continuity requirements and resource dependencies, the BIA shows how downtime will impact the organization and therefore justifies certain business requirements.
Risk Assessment vs. Business Impact Analysis
Risk assessment, which is a related step of business continuity planning, identifies specific potential disasters and setbacks such as cyber-attacks, network failure, natural disaster, supplier failure, utility outage, and so forth. The risk assessment focuses on mitigating these areas of vulnerability.
BIA, in turn, attempts to predict how any of the identified risks, exposed through the risk assessment stage, would affect the business if they were to occur. This will determine the type of recovery for each of these risks is required to mitigate the impact on the business and ensure business continuity. For IT disaster recovery, the conclusions of the BIA will drive the RTOs and RPOs requirements associated with all types of applications and processes supporting the business.
Risk Assessment: 3 Key Starting Points for Effective Business Impact Analysis
How Do I Perform a BIA?
There is no single way to perform a business impact analysis as various lines of business differ across industries, however, the following list covers many areas that should be evaluated during a BIA:
- The changes possible during unplanned disruption
- Legal or regulatory repercussions of unplanned disruption
- Inventory of all business units required for continuity of operations
- Key personnel and support staff
- Post-disruption dependencies
- Validation of test plan
- Ranking of priorities and order of operations
BIA analyzes these areas, in addition to others, and may involve multiple departments and business units across an organization to help your organization develop recovery strategies to match your needs.
How Zerto Supports BIA
Zerto understands that unplanned disruptions do not just affect IT operations—they have a domino effect on your entire organization. As a BIA will show, your organization’s reliance on technology to maintain operations and remain visible to the world steadily increases. Zerto enables an always-on experience that transforms business as usual, helping you realize your innovation goals.
The Zerto solution ensures that your IT systems remain resilient through the potential disruptions identified through a BIA. Zerto enables IT resilience through simple, a single, scalable software that offers unparalleled protection and includes critical features:
- Automated VM / container protection
- Instant VM / container restore
- Instant file restore
By providing the best recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) at scale in the market, Zerto simplicity and resilience supports true business continuity.
Zerto Solution Overview
Other Resources
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Resource Center
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