Do you know what you are going to be exercising over the next 12 to 24 months in your recovery program? Have you forecasted what business units and systems/applications will be exercised and validated to ensure mission critical operations can continue uninterrupted? Forecasting your exercises brings a rhyme and a reason to execution of each event and the allocation of resources, time and money.
To aid in forecasting, you must establish exercise standards dictating the frequency and type of exercise required based on criticality to the organization. The more critical entities and systems/applications you have will need to be exercised more frequently and thoroughly versus the less critical entities and systems/applications.
Once these standards are established, document exercises of the entities and systems/applications over a calendar year. You should focus on the most critical first and note when these will be exercised based on the frequency you established in your standards.
As you progress, you should move from standalone to integrated to business process exercises. This will require multi-department and multiple systems/applications to work together to perform end to end processing of a key corporate service.
About MHA: MHA Consulting, with its decade-long track record, is a proven leader in business continuity planning, disaster recovery planning, IT best practices and data center moves and relocations. Every day, MHA helps protect trillions of dollars of global-market assets and top companies around the world rely on MHA services for the continuity of their business. For more information, please visit: http://staging.mha-it.com or contact Patrick Potter at [email protected]
Michael Herrera
Michael Herrera is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MHA. In his role, Michael provides global leadership to the entire set of industry practices and horizontal capabilities within MHA. Under his leadership, MHA has become a leading provider of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services to organizations on a global level. He is also the founder of BCMMETRICS, a leading cloud based tool designed to assess business continuity compliance and residual risk. Michael is a well-known and sought after speaker on Business Continuity issues at local and national contingency planner chapter meetings and conferences. Prior to founding MHA, he was a Regional VP for Bank of America, where he was responsible for Business Continuity across the southwest region.
