Business Continuity For Dummies

Accepting the Need to Validate Your Recovery Procedures

Here’s a straightforward question: why carry out exercises or tests to validate your business’s recovery procedures at all? Well, because preparation is everything. The reality is that disruption doesn’t strike bearing invitations to down tools and join in if you have time. More likely it arrives with a smack and your feet need to hit the ground running.

Exercising your recovery procedures allows you to discover gaps and weaknesses in your knowledge, understanding and planning of what you need to do and have in place to survive a significant disruption to the normal running of your business.

Without a regular test of your firm’s resilience to disruptive impacts, neither you nor your staff can have confidence that you are ready to tackle things if they go wrong, and your business depends on how you respond and what you can do. Without exercising and testing, your expectations for business maintenance/recovery remain unrealistic at best, and at worst may well scupper your enterprise altogether.

A tested BC strategy adds confidence to your competence.

Above all, through validation you enhance the performance of your most valuable asset – your staff – by demonstrating to them (and to you) that you have confidence in their ability ...