Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and IT Disaster Recovery (ITDR) Exercise Facilitation

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and IT Disaster Recovery (ITDR) Exercise Facilitation - we can explore your crisis management team’s response to a fictional (but realistic) incident, assuring your plans are effective.

BCP / ITDR exercise facilitation

Having an IT Disaster Recovery (ITDR) Plan and a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is of limited value if it does not adequately support the business in its time of need. Regular testing of the ITDR and BCP arrangements is essential to ensure that the plans work as intended, are up-to-date, and can be effectively implemented. It is also important that your crisis management team is trained to cope with the potentially unpredictable nature of an event.

To test the effectiveness of your BCP or ITDR plans, we lead a simulation workshop to explore your crisis management team’s response to a fictional (but realistic) incident. This provides assurance that your plans will be effective when required, will identify areas for improvement, and will help train the team in the continuity process.

We start by assessing the key risks that might trigger invocation of your continuity or ITDR arrangements. These often vary by sector and we use our experience to guide our assessment of where these risks lie.

Having consulted with you on the continuity risks to be tested, we develop a scenario that is designed to disclose news from the scene of the incident in stages so that your team can consider their response to changing events. We conclude the workshop with a ‘lessons learned’ exercise to identify ways to optimise your preparedness for serious incidents. Our test scenarios are bespoke to each client and can include the use of tabletop exercises, custom videos, professional actors, and reporters as part of the simulation.

Following the test exercise, we prepare a report to assess your team’s response to the incident, identify any improvements, and provide assurance to your executive team/board on the outcome.