Business Continuity Impact Analysis

Business continuity impact analysis, usually called business impact analysis or BIA, is the process of determining how the impact of disrupting an organization's activities grows over time and using that understanding to set recovery priorities and targets. Rather than asking what might go wrong — the job of risk assessment — the BIA asks what it would cost the organization if a given activity stopped, for an hour, a day, a week, and how quickly each activity must therefore be restored. ISO 22301, the international standard for business continuity management systems, makes the BIA a foundational requirement: it drives the recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives and resource requirements on which continuity plans are built. ISO/IEC 31010 situates impact analysis within the broader family of risk-assessment techniques. The BIA's distinctive contribution is its focus on time: impact is not a single figure but a curve that rises as a disruption lengthens.