What a business impact analysis does
A business impact analysis decides which services must return, in what order, and how much loss the organization will accept while they are down. It is the input to recovery strategy. It is not the recovery plan itself.
Recovery time and recovery point
Recovery time objective is how long a service can stay down. Recovery point objective is how much data or work can be lost, measured as how far back the last good copy may be. The site-selection guide already uses these ideas in plain terms: a warm site typically recovers in hours, often 4 to 24 hours, because data is copied on a schedule rather than kept live. A hot standby aims at seconds to minutes and a recovery point near zero. The analysis sets the numbers. The site choice has to be able to meet them.
What to measure
The financial-impact work on this site looks at revenue that stops, costs that rise, and failures that cascade into other services. Collect those from the people who run the service, then check the figures against finance. An interview without a check becomes a wish. The data-collection page on this site is the method for those interviews and questionnaires.
From impact to strategy
Once the recovery time and recovery point are set, the strategy has to be able to hit them. A 4-hour recovery time cannot sit on a cold site. A near-zero recovery point cannot sit on a nightly copy. Write the mismatch down. Do not average it away.
Review
Review the analysis when the service, the revenue, or the dependency changes. A recovery time copied forward from an old year is not an analysis.