Planning and Exercises

Many organizations plan and exercise business continuity either by performing a tabletop exercise, which replays a scenario in a paper-based gamed scenario, often with accelerated time, or in live exercises, which fail over applications and data centers to another location during a time agreed on by the business.

The details of how a business fails over its infrastructure depend a lot on the context of the business applications. This context is made up of the business processes that the applications support, how these applications contribute to the bottom line, how people typically use them, and the continuity that the business requires to keep operating. It is therefore not generally possible to determine a set of best practices that will guarantee that every important aspect is considered. However, it is possible to consider common questions that are likely to come up, such as whether failover procedures are documented and tested, what the security posture...