Identify and prioritize the critical business processes and key resource dependencies that most affect revenue, customers and business survival. Calculating the cost of downtime to business—for critical business processes, applications and data— helps to prioritize availability of information and processes and to rationalize investments in business continuity, recovery, availability and security. A BIA serves as the foundation to select a risk mitigation strategy and to implement solutions to keep businesses resilient. The tasks involved in a BIA include (but are not limited to):

• Identify critical business processes
• Review critical supporting systems and applications
• Assess business impact of an outage (tangible and intangible)
• Determine recovery requirements (staffing, skills, facilities etc)
• Determine acceptable and reasonable recovery windows
• Identify data loss threshold
• Define priority of the Business Functions