Testing, Training & Evaluating Your BC Plan

If you don't exercise your business continuity plan, you'll be using it at your own risk. What if it doesn't work? What if some critical information hasn't been updated? Not only do exercises help you determine if the plan is viable, they also can point out weaknesses in the plan that should be addressed before a disruption occurs. This week's articles discuss testing, training and evaluating and should be helpful to you in determining how you are going to test your plan.

Why don't more organizations actively test their BC plans? (Item #1)     If you going to develop a plan you'd better make sure it's going to work. (Item #2)     The best-laid recovery plans count for nothing if they don't deliver when needed. (Item #3)    

There is a need for employee awareness training. (Item #4)     Which employees need awareness training only and which need training & exercising? (Item #5)     When IT experiences a service disruption, so does the entire business. (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

Continuity Central asked various business continuity experts why it seems that many organizations neglect the area of testing and exercising and what individual organizations can do to improve. Each expert was asked the same three questions were asked and the various comments received in response are summarized in this article.
http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0596.html

2. Best Practices for Testing Your Disaster Recovery Plan

If you don't intend to test your disaster recovery plan, there is really no point in having one. The cost required to establish a plan is wasted if no one knows how to execute the recovery plan if and when disaster strikes. Whether you've yet to formulate a plan, are currently building one or already have it in place, disaster recovery tests should be an integral part of your IT strategy - and we can break down why. First we'll outline the most commonly used test approaches, and then we'll highlight some best practice tips for your big day.
http://www.latisys.com/blog-post/best-practices-for-testing-your-disaster-recovery-plan

3. Full-Scale Exercise: How to Conduct a Disaster Recovery Test

For an enterprise IT executive the prospect of even a tiny disaster is far from entertaining. Any hiccup in the data stream could set a company back-in time, money and reputation. While every technology manager worth his or her salt has a disaster recovery (DR) plan, not every manager tests those plans to ensure recovery efforts work flawlessly. In fact, only half of IT organizations with a disaster recovery plan conduct regular testing, according to InformationWeek's 2013 State of Storage survey.
http://www.ironmountain.com/Knowledge-Center/Reference-Library/View-by-Document-Type/General-Articles/F/Full-Scale-Exercise-How-to-Conduct-a-Disaster-Recovery-Test.aspx

4. Training Your Employee after DR/BC Plan Development.

The mere knowledge of the existence of a plan is enough to elevate the comfort level and self-assurance of employees in organizations. Such knowledge is certain to make employees take comfort in knowing that senior management is committed to the protection and preservation of the assets of the organization, including people, the number one asset in any organization. Additionally, the organization can realize several benefits, as well as ensure long run successful implementation of the organization's continuity plan.
http://www.drj.com/article-archives/dr-plan-awareness/training-your-employee-after-drbc-plan-development.html

5. Employee Awareness, Training, and Exercises

This paper discusses how to present your completed plan to the rest of the organization and then validate its quality and effectiveness. Some employees need only an overview of the organization's strategies for response, recovery and business continuity, while others need to learn the associated procedures in order to ensure a successful recovery effort. To do this you need to establish a program divided into awareness education and training and exercising.
http://www.disastersafety.org/wp-content/uploads/AdvTrack-EEAwarenessTrainingExercises_IBHS.pdf

6. End-to-End Business Continuity Testing

Modern business has become so reliant upon Information Technology systems that when IT experiences a services disruption -- so does the business. No longer are computers seen as an alternate method to reduce processing times of manual activities. Rather they have become the only method - the manual processes having been long since decommissioned. The business is all but unable to return to a manual process.
http://www.capgemini.com/resource-file-access/resource/pdf/bc_continuity_whitepaper.pdf