A Business Impact Assessment (BIA) plays a vital role in the business continuity planning process, ensuring that senior management allocates resources in the most cost-effective way to balance operational continuity with business needs. The BIA process must link interruptions of operations with business needs; otherwise the assessment may lead to too much or too little business continuity. BIA methodologies should not only provide a technical assessment of business impacts but also a business justification for disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
This assessment does require interaction from a wide variety of resources at the location and will require both on and off site work.
The goal of this assessment is to help an organization understand their critical business systems and develop business continuity and or a disaster recover plan that is customized for the organization.