The essential operational and/or business support functions that could not be interrupted or unavailable for more than a mandated or predetermined timeframe without significantly jeopardizing the organization. Vital functions without which an organization will either not survive or will lose the capability to effectively achieve its critical objectives.

A review of the components involved in delivery of an enterprise wide process and an assessment of the relationship dependencies and impact of failure of one component.

The point in time to which data must be restored and synchronized to achieve a Maximum Acceptable Outage.

Physical assets (e.g., electrical power, telecommunications, water, gas and transportation) whose disruption or destruction would have a debilitating impact on the economic and/or physical security of an entity (e.g., organization, community, nation).

Staff members whose skills, knowledge and/or involvement are necessary to recover a critical business function.

A management technique developed in 1970's but still popular, in which an organization identifies a limited number of activities it has to get correct to achieve its primary missions.

Looking back in the logistical process (upstream) of a product or service, any supplier that could cause a disruption or outage to the organization's critical functions as documented in the BIA.

An appraisal of the effects of the disaster or incident on human, physical, economic and operational capabilities.

Data backup strategies will determine the technologies, media and offsite storage of the backups necessary to meet an organization's data recovery and restoration objectives.

The copying of production files to media that can be stored both on and/or offsite and can be used to restore corrupted or lost data or to recover entire systems and databases in the event of a disaster.