Exercise Is Good for You and For Your Business Continuity Plan

Abstract

The last assumption can be fatal to the business: " We're never going to use this anyway. " It only takes a cursory review of the news to see that events, whether natural or man-made, happen with regularity. A volcano in Iceland erupts and shuts down air traffic to and within Europe for weeks. An ice storm in Atlanta causes total chaos. Further up the east coast, the same storm causes power outages that last for five days or more affecting homeowners and businesses alike. Things happen and businesses need to be prepared. Part of being prepared is exercising the plan annually. Let me tell you a true story I was the BCP manager for the risk management department of a major card payment company in New York City. Testing our plan was required annually by the central Service Continuity staff. Usually, they provided the scenario but this year they required each business unit to write it's own scenario. We'd previously tested pandemic and civil unrest scenarios. This left me scratching my head for an idea until a news article caught my attention. The New York City Department of Emergency Preparedness was going to run a drill testing the city's response to a hurricane. Hmmmm…..a hurricane. It had been a while since a major hurricane had hit the NYC metro region. If one did, it could cause a loss of our building (we were located along the Hudson River) and the loss of the area due to storm surge (we were located in lower Manhattan). Our employees could be stranded at home due to loss of power and damage to the transportation infrastructure. This could work very well as a BCP scenario. After doing some research with the NYC Department of Emergency Preparedness and with the management firm that operated our building I constructed a scenario with two hurricanes a week apart threatening the NYC area. The first one missed to the south. The second one was a direct hit. In my scenario, lower Manhattan was flooded up to 23 Street. The subways and the commuter trains were completely flooded, as were all the electrical conduits