Virtual Corporation offers an array of business impact analyses targeted at specific organization objectives, conditions and custom-tailored analysis requirements. Virtual Corporation’s consultants have conducted hundreds of BIAs with companies in a wide variety of industry, government, military, education and not-for-profit organizations. We have the resources, methods and templates to get started quickly and produce usable results.

Enterprise BIA (EBIA)
A method to engage, educate and gain senior leadership commitment to an appropriately scaled BC program design and how it can be implemented across the ‘in-scope’ organization. Executive participation is crucial to sustaining your BC program. The EBIA accomplishes four objectives:

• Engage executives to discuss the ‘business case’, work effort and approach alternatives to implement a sustainable BC program, including starting to build senior management support and commitment
• Facilitate dialog with executives to document perspective on the level of impact that becomes intolerable - an essential ingredient to determining which business functions are "critical"
• Reach agreement with executives on guidelines to set recovery requirements (Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives) for critical operations
• Define BC planning scope and prioritize launch sequence for all operations included in program launch

Executive BIA (XBIA)
When senior leadership involvement is high, it is possible to dramatically accelerate BC program design by expanding on the EBIA to include prioritizing critical operations through formal documentation of senior leaders’ input on disruption risks, exposures and impacts. The successful XBIA results in documented recovery requirements for each ‘in scope’ function, service or operation alleviating significant work that would be required of mid-level management to obtain these same essential BC planning criteria on a more tactical basis. Virtual Corporation offers its clients three alternative XBIA approaches:

• Materiality approach: focuses on defining financial and operational thresholds for business continuity planning and investment
  Benefits: Quickly target BC program resources on sites and operations that have the most significant impact on company financial performance, thus deploying limited BC planning resources most efficiently
• Impact assessment approach: focuses on quantifying how long targeted operations and functions can be disrupted before agreed upon impact criteria reach unacceptable levels
  Benefits: Engage leadership to set recovery requirements for functions and services performed across the organization thus eliminating need to conduct more time consuming ‘ground up’ traditional BIA
• Intuitive Interview approach: focuses on a tailored 1 hour interview format with targeted executives to define guidelines for conducting more rigorous BIA activities within their organization
  Benefits: Having the executives input ahead of time can reduce or eliminate debate about relative importance of operations that can often bog down a traditional BIA

Recovery BIA (RBIA)
When senior leadership is not participating, or as an instrument of a more rigorous or granular BC planning initiative, it may be appropriate to conduct a traditional BIA engaging local management in assessing risks and documenting impacts to derive needed recovery requirements.

Application Impact Analysis (AIA)
The AIA does for your IT department what the BIA does for your business – it provides your IT mangers with valuable recovery requirement information derived from the business. We help your IT department define recovery requirements for targeted applications by engaging the business community to articulate how long their critical operations can function without access to these systems. With this application data, Virtual Corporation consultants can further assist your IT department to define the infrastructure recovery requirements and recovery prioritization.

BIA Refresh
Virtual Corporation is often invited to update historical BIAs performed as part of an earlier effort. Our consultants can help your organization to quickly assess how best to leverage historical data to meet your current objectives, tailor your existing templates or utilize Virtual’s proven methods and tools to efficiently gather, analyze and report BIA findings and recommendations. A key objective of every Virtual Corporation consulting engagement is to ensure the sustainability of the work we perform – meaning, when we update your BIA, we also ensure you have an actionable plan to keep it updated in the future.

BIA Methods, Templates and Tools
Highly adaptable tools to meet varying client BIA objectives. Virtual Corporation has a comprehensive methods and templates library which includes many BIA tools including:

• Questionnaires
• Presentations and handout materials
• Data collection surveys created in MS Office and Sustainable Planner™
• Findings and recommendation formats
• Project plans and status reporting formats

Recovery Requirements
A key output of any BIA is to quantify recovery requirements for critical operations, supporting processes, systems, suppliers and assets. Virtual Corporation generally includes defining the following attributes within its BIAs:

1. Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How long can critical operations or support resources be disabled before they must be recovered to minimum recovery capability?
2. Restoration Objective (RO) How long can critical operations or support resources be disabled before they must be recovered to full production capability?
3. Time to Disruption (TTD): How long can a critical support service or system (i.e., IT application used by a critical function) be disabled before it causes the primary function to fail?
4. Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How much historical data must be retained?