Robert Clark 
Validating Your Business Continuity Plan 
Ensuring your BCP actually works

75% of companies without a business continuity plan fail within three years.Disruptive incidents can affect any organisation and occur at any moment. ICT outages, cyber attacks, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, pandemics, supply chain failures and other unexpected events can all affect productivity and in many cases place a company’s survival in serious jeopardy.Business continuity planning is essential to overcoming business disruptions, but too many companies prepare business continuity plans and then shelve them, only for those plans to fail when they’re actually needed.80% of companies that have not recovered from a disaster within one month go out of business.A business continuity plan that isn’t validated isn’t a plan at all – it’s merely a strategy. Indeed, in some cases an untested plan is worse than no plan at all. In spite of this, only 30% of businesses actually validate their business continuity plans.Product overview Business continuity planning is a process of continual improvement, not a matter of writing a plan and then putting your feet up. Attempting to validate every aspect of your plan, however – particularly in a live rehearsal situation – could create a disaster of your own making.Validating Your Business Continuity Planexamines the three essential components of validating a business continuity plan – exercising, maintenance and review – and outlines a controlled and systematic approach to BCP validation while considering each component, covering methods and techniques such as table-top reviews, workshops and live rehearsals.The book also takes account of industry standards and guidelines to help steer the reader through the validation process, including the international standard ISO 22301 and the Business Continuity Institute’s Good Practice Guidelines.In addition, it provides a number of case studies based on the author’s considerable experience – some of them successful, others less so – to highlight common pitfalls and problems associated with the validation process.Contents Introduction Standards and guidelines Business continuity begins at home Defining your exercise programme Selected scenarios Live rehearsal case studies It could happen to anyone, couldn’t it?Maintaining your BCMSReviewing your BCMSPerformance appraisal Using consultants to help you exercise Training and education Additional reference material About the author Robert A Clark is a fellow of the Institute of Business Continuity Management, a fellow of the British Computer Society, a member of the Business Continuity Institute and an Approved BCI Instructor. He was employed by IBM for 15 years and Fujitsu for 11, working with clients on BCM-related assignments. He is now a freelance business continuity consultant at www.bcm-consultancy.com. Since 2014, he has been a part-time associate lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he has delivered BCM courses to both undergraduate and postgraduate students.Move your employees’ BCP awareness from ‘unconscious incompetence’ to ‘unconscious competence’. Order Validating Your Business Continuity Plan today.