Your continuity plans say the business survives.
Test it before something proves it.
Business continuity testing is where planning meets reality: a facilitated exercise that runs your plans, your people, and your recovery assumptions against a realistic disruption.
We design and facilitate continuity exercises across sites, functions, and systems, so you learn where the plan breaks down in a conference room rather than during the real thing.
- Plan validation, functional exercises, and recovery exercises, all-hazards
- Aligned to ISO 22301, FFIEC, HITRUST, and your auditors’ expectations
- Facilitated by practitioners who have run continuity programs inside Fortune 100 companies
Schedule an Initial Consultation
Browse the Scenario Library
What We Hear
“We wouldn’t be in a good spot should we have to recover. We don’t know what’s tied to what.”
“The BIA is done. The plans are written. Nobody has ever run them.”
“Every site has a plan. No two sites would execute it the same way.”
“The audit asks when we last tested. ‘Never’ is not an answer I can give twice.”
Composite statements from real client and prospect conversations. Continuity plans fail quietly: an outdated call tree, a recovery dependency nobody mapped, a workaround that lives in one person’s head.
Testing finds them while they are cheap to fix.
What We Test
- The plan. Can your people execute the continuity plan as written? Where does the document diverge from what the team would actually do?
- The dependencies. The systems, sites, vendors, and people your critical processes actually rely on, including the ones the BIA missed.
- The recovery. Workarounds, alternate sites, manual procedures, and IT disaster recovery sequencing. How far back can you go, how fast, and how safely?
- The people. Succession, cross-training gaps, and whether the team two levels down can run the play when the plan owner is on a plane.
Exercise Formats
- Plan validation tabletop. A facilitated walkthrough of one plan or function against a realistic disruption. The right first test for most continuity programs.
- Functional exercise. Teams execute real procedures: activate the alternate process, run the manual workaround, make the notifications. Tests execution, not discussion.
- Recovery exercise. IT disaster recovery and business recovery run together, in the real world, not just on paper. Links the IT DR practice page.
- Enterprise continuity simulation. A regional event takes down multiple sites at once. Links Crisis Simulations.
Scenarios come from the library: severe weather, regional power loss, cyber outage, vendor failure, site loss. Every exercise is built from your BIA, your plans, and your actual dependencies.
Browse the Scenario Library
When Organizations Test
- An audit, HITRUST, FFIEC, or ISO 22301 cycle requires evidence of testing
- The BIA and plans are newly built or newly rebuilt, and nobody knows if they work
- A real disruption exposed gaps, and the fixes need proving
- A new site, system, or vendor changed the dependency map
- Leadership wants confidence, not assumptions, about surviving a site loss
40+
after-action recommendations adopted by a single client
4
follow-on crisis and continuity exercises commissioned by one client in the year after
4–6 wks
from kickoff to your team in the exercise
What You Get
- Custom scenario built from your BIA, plans, and dependency map
- Senior practitioner facilitation and structured observation capture
- Plan-versus-reality findings: where the document and the team diverge
- After-action report with prioritized recommendations, audit-ready
- A testing cadence recommendation for the program, not just this exercise
Frequently Asked Questions
What counts as business continuity testing?
Any structured validation of your continuity capability: a plan-validation tabletop, a functional exercise where teams execute real procedures, or a recovery exercise that runs IT disaster recovery and business recovery together. Auditors and standards accept facilitated exercises as testing evidence.
What does a business continuity exercise cost?
Tabletop-format continuity exercises start at $25,000. Functional and recovery exercises are scoped to your organization after a consultation, driven by the sites, systems, and teams in play.
How often should we test our business continuity plan?
At least annually for critical functions, and after any major change: a new site, a new system, a reorganization, or a rebuilt plan. ISO 22301, FFIEC, and HITRUST all expect a defined testing cadence, and we help you build one.
Who should participate?
Plan owners, the teams that execute the workarounds, site or function leaders, and IT recovery owners when recovery is in scope. Continuity tests work best with the people who would actually do the work, not just the people who wrote the plan.
Do you test IT disaster recovery too?
Yes. Recovery exercises run IT disaster recovery and business recovery together, so you learn how far back you can go, how fast, and how safely, with the business in the room instead of finding out later.
Will the results satisfy our auditors?
Yes. Exercises align to ISO 22301, FFIEC, HITRUST, and your regulator’s expectations, and the after-action report is written as audit-ready testing evidence with observations, gaps, and prioritized recommendations.
Untested plans are assumptions with formatting.
Fifteen minutes with a practitioner gets you a straight answer
on what to test first and what it costs.