Exercising your strategies and recovery plans on a regular basis is the only way to
ensure they meet your organizations recovery needs. Plans are generally exercised
at least annually with the goal of identifying gaps, capturing updates and equally important
to highlight successes. Exercises nearly always uncover some deficiencies in plans and
strategies but this demonstrates the value of the exercise. Many seasoned BCDR
professionals consider a flawless exercise to be a failure because something was probably
missed. Exercises generally fall into the two catagories below with varying levels of complexity.
Tabletop Walkthrough: Tabletop Walkthroughs include a facilitator presenting as disaster
scenario with team members walking through their recovery plans. The scenario will often
evolve over time to present additional challenges to the teams to ensure the plans are adequate.
A benefit to tabletops is that they require little planning and can be executed with little notice.
Functional Exercise: Functional Exercises include actual recovery of technology and
business processes at designated alternate locations. These exercises are more comprehensive
than tabletops but also require significantly more planning. One overriding concern with
functional exercises is the potential of impacting production business processes. Guarding against
this requires careful preparation especially when dealing with replicated systems and near live data.
Exercise materials generally include:
- Scenario presentation
- Detailed exercise plan with objectives, participants, timelines and anticipated results
- Documented exercise results including successes, lessons learned and action items
Continuity Flow consultants have managed hundreds of both tabletop and functional exercises.
Contact us for further details on how to get the most out of your exercise program.