Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

To ensure that your business continuity program addresses all key elements of business continuity, it is vital to perform a complete analysis of the business, and impacts of any disruption on day-to-day business operations.  Firestorm’s BIA is the foundation work upon which the entire continuity planning process is built.

Our experienced business continuity professionals have created a process that is designed to gather necessary information while requiring minimal resource drain on those key individuals who must provide the information for the analysis.  Firestorm differentiates itself from other competitors with its process, its tools, and its comprehensive deliverables.  The BIA will not only help prioritize planning, testing and training, but will also provide an important guide for critical decisions during response to a business disruption. 

Firestorm’s BIA process examines both financial and operational impacts (such as contractual commitments and penalties or fines, regulatory requirements, reputation, employee, etc.).  Identifying financial and operational impacts by business function results in a prioritized recovery ranking and recovery time objective for each business function critical to the operation of the organization. The process also identifies the resources needed to resume critical functions, as well as identify critical internal and external dependencies essential to the recovery process.

Firestorm’s BIA data collection process is designed to minimize unnecessary information and focus on the specific data required to understand Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), overall criticality rankings and recovery sequences, critical dependencies to applications, internal business processes and external services and providers.

Firestorm emphasizes the importance of creating a customized questionnaire that will align to your company’s business model and management direction for definition of financial and operational impacts.   This helps us gather a broad range of impact information. 

Key departments are asked to participate in the questionnaires and corresponding interviews.

Specifically, the interviews will identify:  

1. Financial and Operational Impacts 
2. Department Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) 
3. Department Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)
4. In-Out-Across Dependencies
5. Internal department to department 
6. Key external suppliers and vendors
7. IT applications

The findings from the BIA will provide your company with reliable data upon which to base decisions to justify strategies and solutions for activities concerning mitigation planning preparedness, recovery, response, and prioritization of critical business processes and personnel.  Firestorm will present a highly customized report generated from the analysis of information captured during Firestorm’s BIA process.The information in the report will provide your company a framework to assess the extent to which existing strategies, recovery plans and processes, and arrangements support the requirements of the critical business functions.