Designing and Running Exercises and Drills
Testing the plan before disaster strikes
A continuity plan that has never been tested is, in practice, just a hypothesis, and exercises and drills are the only way to discover its flaws before a real event exposes them with real consequences. There are different levels of testing, from tabletop exercises where the team discusses its response to a hypothetical scenario without touching systems, to functional drills where operations actually fail over to an alternate site and it's validated that they can be sustained there. Designing good exercises means choosing realistic, challenging scenarios, not just those the organization knows it will pass easily, because the goal is to find weaknesses, not to confirm that everything works. A valuable example is including the unavailability of a key person in the drill, forcing the team to activate the defined backups and revealing whether those backups really know their responsibilities.