An Approach to Automate Business Impact Analysis

One of the main sources for the data required to accomplish an IT Business Continuity (BC) Program is obtained through business impact analysis (BIA). The main objective of conducting BIA is to determine the criticality levels of services that are essential to keep the businessup and running. BIA is crucial for business sustainability and failing to define the criticality of the organization's services and applications leads to improper recovery strategies. However, performing BIA in the traditional way is always associated with several challenges due the nature of business practices and processes that are changing constantly. Automating the data collection of BIA has shown many benefits in capturing the required recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for applications. However, there are numbers of challenges that have been faced during the implementation of such automation. Our approach to conduct BIA exercise consists of seven phases starting with analyzing business need, developing questionnaire, automation implementation, workshops, data gathering, application prioritization, and management approval. This paper describes the importance and challenges of conducting BIA. It shows how an organization could overcome these challenges by automating and centralizing BIA data collection for its applications. Here we illustrate how a BIA exercise is developed and integrated into a centralized data repository for an applications portfolio called MEGA.