CISA Tabletop Exercise Package Assists With Pandemic Recovery And Continuity Planning

by Paul Ciampoli
APPA News Director
Posted July 22, 2020

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has developed a COVID-19 Recovery CISA Tabletop Exercise Package (CTEP) to assist private sector stakeholders and critical infrastructure owners and operators in assessing short-term, intermediate, and long-term recovery and business continuity plans related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The CTEP also provides organizations with the opportunity to discuss how ongoing recovery efforts would be impacted by concurrent response operations to a potential “second wave” of global pandemic infections.

CISA notes that its tabletop exercise packages are designed and developed to provide a customizable virtual exercise for critical infrastructure and private sector partners to review their emergency plans for a multitude of different scenarios.

CTEPs are intended to assist organizations in developing their own tabletop exercises to tailor meet their specific needs, from planning to execution.

CISA’s CTEPs allow users to leverage pre-built exercise templates with realistic scenarios, to build tabletop exercises to assess, develop, and update information sharing processes, emergency plans, programs, policies, and procedures.

The COVID-19 Recovery CTEP includes instructions and templates to help users conduct an exercise within an organization that follows Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program guidance including a Situation Manual.

The manual includes scope, objectives, core capabilities, exercise agenda, the scenario, and discussion questions. It can be tailored by an organization to meet specific needs and objectives.

Additional information about the COVID-19 Recovery CTEP is available here.