If you are responsible for IT, security, or resilience, there is usually a point where a question starts to surface.
You have a Business Continuity Plan and a Disaster Recovery Plan, but you are not sure how confident you are in them. Not because they are poorly written. More because they have never really been used.
At that point, many leaders start looking for practical insight. How are other organisations testing their plans? Where do they start? What does “good” actually look like in practice?
What Do Continuity Planning for Businesses and Disaster Recovery Actually Mean?
- Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is about how an organisation continues to operate during and after a disruption. That includes people, processes, suppliers, communications, and workarounds.
- Disaster Recovery (DR) focuses more specifically on restoring IT systems, data, and technology services after an incident.
In practice, the two are tightly linked. A system might be recoverable, but if people do not know who is in charge, what to prioritise, or how to communicate, recovery still fails.
That is why testing matters as much as planning.
Why Is Planning Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Back at the Top of the Agenda?
From working with clients, one thing is clear. BCP and DR are being taken more seriously than they were even a few years ago.
The driver is not regulation alone. It is exposure.
High-profile ransomware incidents, cloud outages, and supplier failures have made leaders question whether their continuity and recovery arrangements would hold up under pressure.
The question has shifted from “do we have a plan?” to “could we execute it when it matters?”
How Are Organisations Testing Their BCP Business Continuity Plan and DR Plans?
The most common starting point is not rewriting the plan. It is running structured tabletop exercises.
A tabletop exercise brings together the people who would be involved in a real incident and walks through a realistic disruption scenario step by step. Decisions are discussed as they would happen, with limited information and competing priorities.
For many organisations, this is the first time the plan moves from theory to something tangible.
What Do Tabletop Exercises Usually Reveal?
Tabletop exercises surface issues quickly, often within the first hour.
Common examples include:
- Uncertainty over who has authority to declare an incident
- Confusion between response and recovery leadership
- Recovery time objectives that feel unrealistic once discussed
- Assumptions about suppliers or cloud services that have never been tested
- Disagreement over what systems or services should be prioritised
These are not unusual findings. They are the natural result of plans that have not been exercised.
Why Is Testing BCP and Disaster Recovery Procedure Plan Not Just an IT Issue?
Many leaders start this work assuming it sits primarily with IT or security. Tabletop exercises tend to challenge that assumption.
The incidents organisations are most concerned about today rarely affect one system or one team. Ransomware, SaaS outages, third-party failures, loss of key staff, and communications breakdowns all cut across the business.
Testing BCP and DR quickly becomes a leadership exercise. It shows how decisions are made, how quickly alignment happens, and whether accountability is clear when there is no perfect answer.
What Does “Good” Look Like When Testing Business Continuity and DR?
Teams that do this well are not aiming for a perfect plan.
They are aiming for confidence. Confidence that roles are understood, decisions can be made quickly, recovery priorities are realistic, and surprises are reduced.
If you are at the stage of wondering how to test your Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plan, the most useful place to start is simple.
See how it behaves when people have to use it. That is where the real insight comes from.
Want to Test Your Business Continuity Management and DR Plan Properly?
If you are thinking about testing your Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plan and want a realistic view of how it would hold up, it can help to do that with people who run these exercises regularly.
We work with organisations to design and facilitate tabletop exercises that reflect real incidents, real constraints, and real decision-making. The focus is not on catching anyone out, but on building confidence and clarity before it is needed.
If you want to talk through where you are and what a practical starting point might look like, you can book a call to discuss it.
