Business continuity
Tests and simulations
An untested plan is an assumption.
What this work consists of
A plan that looks good on paper fails on details that only surface when someone tries to follow it. We build the scenario, put the people in the room, and run the exercise, with a script written for your environment and injects that change the picture midway and force decisions under pressure. The goal is not to pass the test: it is to make the failures show up right there, before they get expensive.
The format determines what the exercise reveals. At the tabletop, leadership talks through the decisions out loud without executing anything, and that is where misalignment about who decides what shows up first. In the simulation with execution, parts of the plan actually run: the call tree fires, the restore is tested, and the measured time is compared with the promised time. The annual program chains exercises with varied scenarios, increasing difficulty, and progress indicators.
On your side, we need the plans that will be tested, the right people in the room, and, when there is real execution, formal authorizations and agreed windows before anything starts. In the end you receive the script that was used, the report on what worked and what got stuck, and the improvement plan with what needs fixing before the next exercise or the real incident.
How we conduct it, stage by stage
The stages and deliverables below describe the Simulation with live execution modality. The other modalities appear when you request the proposal.
Planning and authorisation
We agree the scope in writing and set the windows, the emergency contacts and the formal authorisations. No test starts without that.
Writing the plans
We write the plans in the format someone will use on the worst day of the year: direct, with steps and phone numbers.
Exercise
We put people in the situation and run it. What fails here is what would have failed for real.
Presentation
A meeting with leadership translating the technical result into business risk and investment decisions. We arrive with the answers to the questions the board always asks: what to attack first, how much effort it takes and what happens if nothing is done.
What is not included
- Writing the plans that will be tested, which is a different service and comes first
- Any test requiring a real production outage without formal written authorization, which we will not run under any circumstances
- Technical attack simulation tools, which are cybersecurity scope
- Executing the fixes in the improvement plan, which belongs to the owner of each action; in the annual program we track progress, we do not execute for them
- Rewriting the plans after the exercise, which stays with the owner of each document or with the continuity service
- Test environment and restore infrastructure for the simulation with execution, which is provisioned by your IT team or the provider
- Simulated phishing campaigns, which test people against a scam, not plans against a crisis, and are a different service
- Attendance of the people summoned, which is your leadership's commitment: a tabletop without the decision makers tests nothing
Usually comes together with
Not a bundle, and it changes nothing you have already chosen. It is what tends to come up next, in the experience of companies that have been through this.