Business impact analysis (BIA) templates

Release version: Australia

Updated March 12, 2026

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Summary of Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Templates

The Business Continuity Management (BCM) application includes pre-configured Business Impact Analysis (BIA) templates that allow administrators to create effective business impact analyses. Utilizing the BIA Templates module, BCM or BIA administrators can select relevant templates, elements, and impact categories to streamline the analysis process.

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Key Features

Simplified Creation: BIA templates ease the process of developing business impact analyses.
Time Efficiency: Templates come pre-populated, saving time and resources.
Primary Object Selection: Templates help define the primary object type for analysis, such as IT applications.
Automatic Dependency Population: Dependency groups are automatically included in the BIA.
Relevant Impact Categories: Select impact categories that pertain specifically to your organization.

Key Outcomes

With the snbcm.admin role, users can view and configure BIA templates, allowing for tailored business impact analyses. Key configurations include:

Name and Description: Search and select appropriate templates.
Primary Element Assessed: Choose elements like business processes or CI services for assessment.
Impact Categories: Evaluate specific impacts, such as financial or legal consequences of downtime.
Dependency Assessments: Identify and manage dependencies relevant to the analysis.
Include CIA: Add Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability information for critical data elements.

Dependency groups, such as Applications, Hardware, and Vendors, are automatically populated and can be customized within the BIA template for comprehensive assessments.

The Business Continuity Management application provides pre-configured business impact analysis (BIA) templates for creating a business impact analysis. If you are the BCM or BIA administrator, you can use the BIA Templates module in the Business Continuity Management application. You can then select the type of the template, elements, impact categories, and so on, for the business impact analysis.

Advantages of using a BIA template

The BIA templates store information such as the impact categories and dependency groups that a business process depends on. Using a BIA template offers these advantages:

Simplifies the process of creating a business impact analysis.
Saves time and resources by pre-populating the templates.
Helps you to define the primary object type that you can use the BIA template for. For example, you can use the Application technical impact analysis template to perform a technical impact analysis of an IT application.
Populates the dependency groups automatically in the BIA.
Helps you to select the impact categories that are relevant to your organization.

BIA templates in BCM

If you have the sn_bcm.admin role, you can view the BIA templates that are installed with demo data when you install the application or configure a BIA template in the BIA Templates module. The example shows the BIA templates that are installed with demo data in the Business Continuity Management application.

BIA templates that are installed with demo data.

BIA template configuration

With the sn_bcm.admin role, you can configure these details in the BIA template:

Name and Description: Use the Name and Description fields to search for the name and select an appropriate template for your business impact analysis.
Primary Element Assessed: Select the type of the elements that you plan to assess such as Business processes or CI service.
Impact Categories: Assess specific impact categories during the business impact analysis. For example, you plan to assess the financial impact and legal impact of a downtime.
Dependency Assessments: Identify the dependencies for your business impact analysis.
Include CIA: Include CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) information in your business impact analysis if the primary element being analyzed has critical data.

The example shows the sample configuration of a BIA template in an instance.

Configuration of a BIA template.

Configuring a BIA template

For more information on how to configure a BIA template with the sn_bcm.admin role, see Configure BIA templates with legacy assessment.

Impact dependency groups

The BIA template used for creating a business impact analysis has dependency groups associated with it. When conducting an assessment, the dependency groups are automatically populated in the BIA. You can view them as Applications, Hardware, Software, Vendors, Workplaces, and others, each in its own container depending on how many of these groups are associated to the template.

Each of them is a dependency group and you can add or remove items that belong to each group within its container.