Planned Activations
Testing Your Business Continuity Plan
A Planned Activation tests your business' actual capability to respond to a crisis during a non-critical time.
Our Planned Activation methodologies can rehearse your people, test your server recovery, check phone diversions, review data communications access and also check and implement a physical setup in one of our standby office environments. The scope of your crisis event activation test will be customised to suit you.
A Planned Activation allows your organisation to test as much of your Business Continuity Plan as you require giving you confidence in your level of preparation for a real business disruption. The activation service can include your choice of:
- Assessing your Business Continuity and/or Disaster Recovery Plan objectives.
- Recommending the type of tests that would validate your business' recovery objectives.
- Preparing relevant test scenarios, learning objectives, and success criteria.
- Facilitating the staging and execution of scheduled tests.
- Capturing auditable team actions, communication details, improvements and lessons learned during the test.
- Developing pre and post-test action plans to fill the gaps, prioritise organisational issues and plan improvements to your business continuity programme.
- Recommending training and awareness agendas for test participants.
Plan & Test for the Unexpected
Planned Activations are scheduled well in advance to make the best use of both your resources and the Plan B team, to ensure we meet your expectations and most effectively test the scenarios you prioritise.
External scenarios can include any of the following:
- Catastrophic event e.g. building destroyed by fire/flood/explosion;
- Power interruption;
- Telecommunication interruption;
- Neighbouring building destroyed by fire/flood/explosion;
- Influenza pandemic;
- Terrorist attack; or
- Interruption to supply chain.
Internal scenarios may include:
- Employee sabotage to data;
- Water damage e.g. accidental activation of fire sprinklers;
- Loss of back up data; or
- Unexpected staff shortages (influenza pandemic).
Planned Activation Scenarios
Once we have prioritised your scenarios, the Planned Activation is aligned with what parts of your Business Continuity Plan you want to test, most likely one or more of the following:
- Loss of access to workplace building – short term (homicide, gas leak, adjacent building issue).
- Loss of workplace building (fire, flood, explosion, earthquake).
- Loss of key staff (death, pandemic, disabling accident).
- Loss of single piece of IT infrastructure (switch, router, server, ESX host, SAN, specialised equipment).
- Short term interruption to data centre (power outage, data centre move, communication/switching issue).
- Loss of all IT infrastructure (data centre fire, power failure).
- Loss of communications links (branches, head office, data centre).