Rothstein Associates Inc. Business Survival ™ Weblog

Most simulations we’ve encountered in business continuity and disaster recovery planning have been limited to the table top variety conducted at a conference or perhaps coordinated within your organization internally. Such events typically involve groups of people role playing to act out events of a pretend disaster situation.

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The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) hosted Cyber ShockWave, a simulated cyber attack on the United States, February 16, 2010 in Washington D.C. providing an unprecedented look at how the government would develop a real-time response to a large-scale cyber crisis affecting much of the nation.

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On Tuesday, February 16, 2010, the US will undergo a simulated cyberattack to help policymakers decide how well the country would cope.

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As we are all aware, a business continuity plan is only effective if it accurately reflects the needs, technology and structure of the organization. But, more importantly, a business continuity plan can only be considered to be truly effective if the content and the components of the plan have been exercised.

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We learn from others by reading case studies, after-action reports, results of audits and investigations, and from personal experience. In the personal experience category, the author favors learning by participating in disaster exercises. Though successful exercises are good, it’s many times the failures that provide the real learning opportunities.

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You’ve written your disaster plan and distributed it to your staff. You’ve included all the points required for a decent plan: assigning a disaster recovery team and coordinator, creating detailed recovery procedures and instructions and call trees with employees and vendors. You’ve covered hot topics such as pandemic planning and long term back-up power. Now you sit back and wait for a disaster to show how ready your systems are for it, right?

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Not everyone agrees on the need to do a full-boat practice run — but it can’t hurt anything except your short-term expenses.

Data aggregation vendor QL2 Software Inc. already follows best practices to prepare for the worst. It has redundant systems and regularly reviews its plans for both disaster recovery and business continuity. But when it comes to the ongoing H1N1 pandemic, company executives admit, they were a bit worried.

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A fourth exercise to test the functioning of the EU’s Emergency and Crisis Coordination Arrangements in Brussels (CCA) was conducted successfully between 25 and 29 September 2009.

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Planned business continuity tests have been postponed until next summer due to the market disruptions of the past couple of years, The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada said.
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The Business Continuity Institute (BCI) has produced two new Business Continuity training DVDs:

Practice Makes Perfect: exercising made easy – a comprehensive guide to exercising Business Continuity plans

and

Understanding Your Business: How to do a Business Impact Analysis.

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Why is DR testing still the same time and money sink that it always was?

One reason is that although there have been advances in disaster recovery testing, they have not kept pace with the growth in DR technologies.

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