Testing and Exercising

If you haven't tested your business continuity plan, you might as well not have one. Creating the plan and putting on a shelf or a computer doesn't finish the job. You have to know the plan will work when disaster strikes. Your plan may be a year old� has it been updated to reflect any changes in technology and/or personnel? If not, you could find yourself with a plan that will fail. This week's articles can help you keep your plan in tip-top shape and ready to roll.

Why is business continuity testing and exercising a weak area? (Item #1)   It is imperative to keep plans up-to-date, but the difficulty lies in "how." (Item #2)   No solution will work flawlessly during a disaster if you simply implement it and then ignore it for a year. (Item #3)  

Testing for success should come before the actual disaster. (Item #4)   Fire evacuation tests always get done� but you can do more with them. (Item #5)   What do you test, how do you test, and how do you get management buy-in? (Item #6)  

As always, we look forward to hearing your comments & insights regarding business continuity.
If you have a topic you'd like us to cover, email me at [email protected].

Bob Mellinger, President
Attainium Corp

1. Improving business continuity testing and exercising

Three surveys published recently seem to show that testing and exercising of business continuity and disaster recovery plans and strategies is generally a weak area. Experts weigh in on why it seems that many organizations neglect the area of testing and exercising and what individual organizations can do to improve.
http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0596.html

2. The Conundrum of Keeping Business Continuity Plans Up-to-Date

Unless plans are considered a live and integral part of an organization's operations and culture and are therefore updated and tested regularly, they quickly become less useful during an emergency, and eventually completely obsolete. While likely any BCP, even if slightly out-of-date, is better than nothing, having a ready to use plan, with up-to date information and data can make the difference between an organization's ability to continue operations with minimum downtime, and a corporate catastrophe.
http://www.bcpnews.com/?p=292

3. Tech Tip: Test disaster recovery plans on a regular basis

The fallacy of the "set-it-and-forget-it" approach has led to more data loss than any other potential problem normally associated with DR solutions. Many software and hardware vendors make incredibly reliable solutions and systems. These DR methodologies have great success rates when it comes time to fail over during an emergency.
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-22_11-5294969.html

4. http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-22_11-5294969.html

Testing insures that personnel, facilities and all needed materials are at the ready should the worst occur. There are several different ways the business continuity plan can be tested based on the specific needs of the organization. Here are five general tests that can be run to help evaluate a business continuity plan.
http://www.businessknowledgesource.com/manufacturing/_5_tips_for
_testing_your_bcp_022731.html

5. Enhance Your Fire Evacuation Exercise with Business Continuity

But instead of just letting everyone troop back into the building after the evacuation test is complete, why not just whisper in the ears of one or two members of your incident management team and get them to run through the initial stages of their plans.
http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/3/30/enhance-your-fire-evacuation-
exercise-business-continuity/#ixzz0e160tsEA

6. Disaster Recovery Plan Testing: Cycle the Plan, Plan the Cycle

Senior management must be made to understand that: 1) an untested DRP is unlikely to succeed in an actual recovery, and may in fact be more dangerous due to unverified assumptions; 2) the DRP is a dynamic document, testing and plan maintenance is an integral part of DRP development and implementation.
http://www.sans.org/reading_room/whitepapers/recovery/disaster_recovery_plan_testing
_cycle_the_plan_plan_the_cycle_563?show=563.php&cat=recovery