Testing and Exercising

Validating Plan Viability

You cannot know if a Business Continuity or IT Disaster Recovery plan is viable until you test it. Testing is important but it can also be difficult to accomplish. Every organization needs to ask itself:

  1. Are simple tabletop tests sufficient?
  2. Would the results of testing a single plan differ if it had been tested simultaneously with other plans?
  3. How can IT recovery time objectives be integrated into
    test scenarios?
  4. How can both plans and the Incident Management teams be
    tested together?
  5. What will happen when a real incident occurs and we haven't had time to prepare (as in most test situations)?

A Tool for Managing Any Incident

CommandCentre was designed to provide the capability to manage any incident. In real life, it's unlikely a disruption will result in the invocation of a single plan. More likely, a crisis or disaster will require 5, 10, or even 100 plans to be invoked simultaneously. CommandCentre was designed to make the management of any incident possible by providing dynamic Decision Support, real-time Collaboration and Dashboard reporting tools adaptable to any real life situation.

What works in real-time also works for test scenarios. Whether testing DR plans, BC plans or both, CommandCentre provides testing and simulation tools to get verifiable results. CommandCentre allows BCM managers to simulate any scenario conditions. Scenarios can be developed in advance, or created on the fly.

Because CommandCentre uses Toolkit's underlying intelligence, gathered through Organizational, Process and Technology Modeling, CommandCentre allows testers to understand the interdependencies among assets and gain an understanding of what would occur if the scenario were real.

Testing and Exercising may reveal:

  • What assets are actually impacted when a scenario is invoked
  • What plans truly need to be activated to respond to it
  • What teams need to be notified and how long that takes
  • What constituent groups need to be kept up-to-date
  • Which plan procedures are useful and which are not
  • What level of collaboration between recovery teams is necessary
  • Whether responders can truly multitask and participate in multiple-plan activation scenarios
  • What issues arise, how to resolve them in timely fashion
  • How long it really takes to accomplish various plan procedures
  • Whether recovery teams or Incident Management teams require additional training

You should find out the answers to these questions before a real crisis happens.

Throughout testing, CommandCentre records every action. Each activity is logged and presented in a report format ideal for post-mortem reviews and audit records.