Declaration of a Disaster

---

Business Impact Analysis

A business impact analysis (BIA) is an assessment of your company's strengths and weaknesses as they pertain to the company's ability to recover from a severe business interruption or a complete disaster. You should also be able to define what areas of your business are mission-critical, business-critical, or functional-critical. The level of criticality will determine your actions in the face of disaster. Typically, companies conduct BIAs for all areas of business, not just for IT. If your company is currently not conducting formal studies such as this, now is a great time to start as you begin the creation of your disaster recovery plan. No company is too small to conduct a BIA, because every company has something to lose in a disaster.

After the assessment has been done, a summary of the report should be included at the very least to inform the DR team of the expectations of the business units. The report should include items such as application/server, recovery location, recovery time, date BIA was done, and the parties that approved this BIA. Table D.1 shows an example of a BIA report template. If you do not have a template for a business impact analysis, you may use the business impact analysis planning kit to develop one.

You may also want to include where these BIAs are being stored, including both electronic storage and physical storage, such as is discussed in the next section.

---