June 7, 2018

Last Updated on January 18, 2024

There is no shortage of sobering statistics on how businesses that do no planning fare when disaster strikes: not well. In the absence of planning, people don’t know what to do and confusion reigns. That means it will take longer to recover from the disaster, and that greater and unnecessary damage to systems, data, sales, reputation and customer relationships is more likely to occur.
How much downtime, unplanned expense, and revenue loss can your organization endure? For organizations that want an answer before a disaster strikes, a business continuity plan (BCP) is the first step.
The goal of a BCP is to give your organization the ability to respond effectively to the impacts from a range of threats, from hurricanes to malware. The BCP takes into account the functions your company performs, their criticality to overall operations, and how they interrelate.
Once you’ve created your BCP, the next step is to exercise it around a table, to educate people about the plan and shake out issues to make it more effective. Unlike a simulated disaster, this kind of tabletop exercise takes very little time and doesn’t require you to bring down critical systems.
You just get all the people who have a role in implementing your BCP around a table and talk through the recovery processes together using the plan itself.
To guide our efforts when we run through business continuity exercises with clients, Pivot Point Security has developed a BCP Tabletop Exercise Template.
That same template our business continuity professionals use is now available to you to download, free of charge.
We invite you to take advantage of this template as you walk through your own BCP tabletop exercise. Should you need any additional help or expertise along the way, please get in touch.