Foundations of Resilience: Mastering the Business Impact Analysis

What would happen if your organization faced a significant outage, cyberattack, or supply chain disruption tomorrow? If you can’t quickly identify critical functions, acceptable downtime, or cascading impacts, your continuity strategy may fail precisely when needed most. Effective continuity planning begins with a Business Impact Analysis (BIA).

This session explores why a BIA is the foundational step for building robust business continuity, disaster recovery, and incident response capabilities. Attendees will learn how conducting a BIA clarifies operational priorities, maps critical dependencies, and establishes essential recovery metrics such as Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), and Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD). Practical guidance will be provided on conducting stakeholder interviews, accurately documenting dependencies, validating results, and effectively communicating findings to executive leadership.

Additionally, the discussion will highlight how a well-executed BIA strengthens cross-domain integration across Business Continuity Planning (BCP), Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP), and Incident Response Planning (IRP), facilitating a cohesive resilience strategy. Common pitfalls, including inadequate stakeholder involvement and lack of executive sponsorship, will be addressed with pragmatic recommendations for overcoming these challenges. Whether creating a new continuity plan or refining an existing one, participants will gain actionable insights into conducting an impactful BIA, fostering stronger alignment between business and technology teams, smarter resource allocation, and enhanced organizational resilience.