Which activity is a common form of disaster recovery and business continuity testing?

• A. Team walk-through of a hypothetical incident to test coordination
• B. Replacing production systems during the exercise
• C. Deactivating all security controls
• D. Reducing monitoring during the exercise

Answer: (A)

Testing disaster recovery and business continuity hinges on rehearsing how teams respond to incidents and how operations resume. A team walk-through of a hypothetical incident is a tabletop-style exercise that focuses on coordination, communication, roles, and decision-making without touching live systems. This people-focused approach helps surface gaps in plans, contacts, and procedures before any changes are made to production, making it a common form of DR/BC testing. Replacing production systems during the exercise would be a live failover test with higher risk and complexity, not the typical safe method for validating coordination and plans. Deactivating all security controls would undermine security and create unnecessary risk, while reducing monitoring during the exercise would hide issues and impair the ability to detect and respond to problems.