Business Continuity Plan Testing

Business continuity plan testing is a wide ranging topic but has one key objective - establishing whether or not you can trust your plan and the competence of those who have a major role in it. Business continuity plans can be tested using methods that give a high degree of confidence that they will work when required, others provide lower levels of confidence.  Practicalities often dictate which methods can be used to obtain the optimal level of assurance. For instance:

• Recovering an organisations basic infrastructure give it a fighting chance of recovering from a major operational disruption. It's infrastructure (such as information systems & workplace or other fundamentals such as supply chain substitution and / or equipment replacement require a high degree of confidence.  If these aspects of business continuity are based on flawed or unproven assumptions, an organisation can quickly face an existential crisis.

• Some parts of the BCP can only be assessed under hypothetical situations -this is the traditional desktop / table top exercise. These types of test can be augmented by role play or social media sand boxes to simulate likely situations that might occur - but for obvious reasons cannot be tested with the same veracity as actually performing the IT recovery plan.

 

When we work with organisations who need our help with establishing a holistic approach to business continuity testing, we help them to establish a comprehensive business continuity testing framework that creates as series of tests  based around the most effective testing methods that provide the optimum level of trust.  The image below shows an example of a testing framework that can be applied to any organisation looking to get to grips with business continuity plan testing. To help organisations with their business continuity plan testing we provide a comprehensive template to help Develop Business Continuity Plan tests