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When a disruptive incident strikes, you need to know that your business continuity plan (BCP) will work smoothly and consistently. Many companies, however, fail to carry out any business continuity exercising. This book explains why validating your BCP is essential to your business’s survival and describes the component parts of a validation program, with case studies and expert guidance.
Disruptive incidents can affect any organization and occur at any moment. ICT outages, cyber attacks, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, pandemics, supply chain failures, and other unexpected events can all affect productivity and in many cases place a company’s survival in serious jeopardy.
Business continuity planning is essential to overcoming business disruptions, but too many companies prepare business continuity plans and then shelve them, only for those plans to fail when they’re actually needed.
A business continuity plan that isn’t validated isn’t a plan at all—it’s merely a strategy. Indeed, in some cases an untested plan is worse than no plan at all. In spite of this, only 30% of businesses actually validate their business continuity plans.
Business continuity planning is a process of continual improvement, not a matter of writing a plan and then putting your feet up. Attempting to validate every aspect of your plan, however—particularly in a live rehearsal situation—could create a disaster of your own making.Validating Your Business Continuity Plan examines the three essential components of validating a business continuity plan—exercising, maintenance, and review—and outlines a controlled and systematic approach to BCP validation while considering each component, covering methods and techniques such as table-top reviews, workshops, and live rehearsals.
The book also takes account of industry standards and guidelines to help steer the reader through the validation process, including the international standard ISO 22301 and the Business Continuity Institute’s Good Practice Guidelines.
In addition, it provides a number of case studies based on the author’s considerable experience—some of them successful, others less so—to highlight common pitfalls and problems associated with the validation process.
Robert A. Clark is a fellow of the Institute of Business Continuity Management, a fellow of the British Computer Society, a member of the Business Continuity Institute, and an Approved BCI Instructor. He was employed by IBM for 15 years and Fujitsu for 11, working with clients on BCM-related assignments. He is now a freelance business continuity consultant at www.bcm-consultancy.com. Since 2014, he has been a part-time associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he has delivered BCM courses to both undergraduate and postgraduate students.