The first step to disaster recovery planning is to identify the processes and systems that are critical to your business operations. A business impact analysis (BIA) involves identifying critical processes within an organization, determining the impact to the organization if the process were disrupted in any way, and creating workarounds for these processes while they are in the process of being restored. Performing a BIA is the first step in identifying those areas where you need to do serious disaster recovery and backup planning.

 

The instructions and templates on this site focus on business processes that rely on information technology resources, although a comprehensive BIA should include all processes in an organization. You can apply the process and tools to any area of your operations.

 

Successfully completing a BIA requires participation from the management levels most familiar with the impact of IT resources on day-to-day business operations. In an academic environment, this might include researchers or other staff members who can give insight into their unique work and its impact to the university or their college, school, or unit.

 

The remainder of this page explains each factor to be considered in more detail. Use this information to help you complete the template, which you can download as a Word document.