# What is a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)?

> A business impact analysis identifies what an organization cannot afford to lose — the processes, dependencies, and time limits that determine how damaging an outage or disruption would be.

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## Content

The BIA inventories business processes, the assets and dependencies they rely on, the tolerable downtime and data loss for each, and the consequences of disruption over time. Its outputs — recovery priorities, RTOs, and RPOs — drive continuity and disaster-recovery planning rather than the other way around.

### Key points

- **Process-first analysis:** The BIA asks “what must keep running and how soon,” then maps the technology that serves it — a system-centric BIA misses the business reality.
- **Time sensitivity:** Impact grows with downtime; measure tolerable outage per process and per dependency, including third parties.
- **Important limitation:** A BIA is a snapshot built on interviews and estimates. Dependencies change faster than most BIAs are refreshed, and undocumented workarounds and shadow systems are exactly what formal inventories miss.

### Related terms

[Business continuity](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/business-continuity/>) · [Disaster recovery](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/disaster-recovery/>) · [Recovery time objective (RTO)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/recovery-time-objective/>) · [Recovery point objective (RPO)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/recovery-point-objective/>) · [Cyber risk](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cyber-risk/>) · [Risk assessment](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/risk-assessment/>)

### Sources

[NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1, Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/34/r1/upd1/final) · [Ready.gov, Business Impact Analysis](https://www.ready.gov/business-continuity-plan)

## Attribution and scope

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