Business Continuity Planning - Testing and Organizational Acceptance

Testing and Organizational Acceptance

The purpose of testing is to achieve organizational acceptance that the solution satisfies the recovery requirements. Plans may fail to meet expectations due to insufficient or inaccurate recovery requirements, solution design flaws or solution implementation errors. Testing may include:

• Crisis command team call-out testing
• Technical swing test from primary to secondary work locations
• Technical swing test from secondary to primary work locations
• Application test
• Business process test

At minimum, testing is conducted on a biannual schedule.

The 2008 book Exercising for Excellence, published by The British Standards Institution identified three types of exercises that can be employed when testing business continuity plans.